A Paper Wall
by Amicitia Revenant
Summary: Following Karai's destruction of the second Lair, and Leo's return from Japan, the Turtles must find a way to rebuild their home and their family. Neither will be easy...
1. One

A/N: Sorry for, well, the huge A/N, but there's some stuff you should know before diving into this story. (There is a story down there, I promise.) I guess you can skip it if you want, but then you... won't know stuff. And wouldn't that be horrible? So.

Warnings and Disclaimers: There is a little bit of swearing in this fic. There are some parts that might kind of look like Turtle-cest, but I promise nothing is going on. The Turtles, Splinter, April, Casey, and most of the objects and places in this story do not belong to me. (Well, none of the places belong to me literally... but most of them I didn't even make up.)

Continuity Notes: This story takes place in NT Season 4. It follows from the events in "Exodus" (parts 1 and 2), "The Ancient One", "Scion of the Shredder", and "Prodigal Son". In case you're not familiar with those episodes (canon spoilers ahead):

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Shredder attempts to leave Earth, in a spaceship. For various reasons, the Turtles and Splinter wind up on the ship as it's taking off. Shredder finds them there and defeats them in a battle. Determined to win the war, the Turtles decide to trigger an explosion in the ship's power core. Of course, this will kill them too. Fortunately, at the last minute, the Utroms arrive and rescue everyone from the ship. Our mighty mutants (and Karai) are sent home to Earth, while Shredder is exiled to an ice asteroid.

Back in New York, Leo spends the next several episodes in a major snit over his perceived failure on the spaceship. Eventually, Splinter, recognizing that he can't give Leonardo the help he needs, sends Leo on a journey to Japan, to find "the Ancient One" and study with him. Leo does as he's told, learns a few things, and forgives himself for his mistakes.

Some time later, the Ancient One suddenly tells Leonardo that his family is in danger. Leo rushes home, only to discover that the Lair has been completely destroyed by Karai and her Foot soldiers. Unwilling to believe that his family is dead, Leo sets out to find them. He successfully reunites his family and brings them to a new home - an abandoned pump station under Central Park.

This story begins a few weeks after that, but before any other major plot events - except that the Turtles, after their brief disappearance, have re-established contact with Casey and April.

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There are some discrepancies between the canon of those episodes, and the events of this story, but I think the differences are in the details. Forgive me my artistic license.

A final note: This story gets pretty depressing, especially in the second half. If you're looking for something cheerful and uplifting, you are probably in the wrong fic.

Thanks to Sai Ninja and River Nymph for beta-ing parts of this story. Any remaining awkward sentences, confusing scenes, or failures of plot logic are entirely my fault.

And now... on with the fic! (See, I told you there was one.)

**A Paper Wall**

One

They've been working on the new Lair for three weeks now, slowly turning it from a shelter into a home, and Splinter has finally declared the place to be fit for guests. The Turtles waste no time in inviting Casey and April, who have been impatient to see their friends' new digs. They make it clear that this will not be a dinner party: their food stores are still too low to share, and they don't want to ask for any more handouts. It will be strictly a house tour and a chance to hang out.

Don is out retrieving April, and Raph is getting Casey. Mike and Leo loiter around the bare main room, waiting. Splinter is there too, but he's standing with a calm, centered gravity that can't be called loitering.

The door opens. April takes one step, and Mike sees a million things in her eyes. Shock at the hollow space. Sadness for the loss of their former home. Outrage, that they're reduced to living this way.

Then she tries to say something nice, and Mike is ashamed. Everything he has is cheaply shined tin foil, a thin mockery of a real life.

April holds out a basket wrapped in crinkling cellophane. "I brought this for you," she says. "As a house-warming gift."

Leo takes it from her. "Thank you," he says. "You didn't have to -"

"I know," she says. "I wanted to."

* * *

They go into the kitchen. That's where all the furniture is. When they moved in, there was already a table and more chairs than they could use. Even better, there was a microwave, a refrigerator, and a stove. Almost unbelievably, all three of those worked as soon as they were reconnected to electricity and gas.

They had cleaned the kitchen aggressively, until Master Splinter had almost passed out from chemical fumes. As long as they don't look out the door, they can almost pretend they're in a normal house.

Raph and Casey come in. When they sit down, the tide turns: there are more full chairs than empty ones. Now it really feels like a party.

* * *

They all keep staring at the basket, their eyes boring hungrily through the clear plastic. Just beyond that translucent barrier is a fountain of fruit, artfully deployed.

Mike, like most people living on the thin edge of destitution, isn't usually sentimental about food this way. But he thinks it would almost be a crime to eat the arrangement.

* * *

"Guys," April says, after losing their attention for the thousandth time. "Just open it already."

Leo draws his sword and cuts the top off the bunched cellophane, just below the profusion of ribbon holding it closed. Normally he makes it a rule not to use his weapons for household tasks, but they're short on kitchen knives right now and he has no idea where the ones they do have might be.

Don lifts the basket out of its plastic shell, and noisily wads up the decapitated wrapper.

"This one is mine," Mike says, cautiously poking the pineapple. "And this one," he tags a banana, "and this one," he slaps an enormous orange, "and -"

"Knock it off, bonehead," Raph says, smacking Mike's hand. "We're gonna peel those before we eat 'em anyway."

* * *

"Hey," Casey says. "I brought you guys some stuff too." He hauls his duffel bag onto the table, and unloads five old shoeboxes. Each is labeled with a mutant's initial. He passes them around.

"Go on," he says. "Open 'em."

They all open their boxes simultaneously. They each lift out and hold up one stiffly creased pillowcase in their signature color.

Diplomatic actions are always Leo's territory. "Thanks, Casey," he says. "That's... very thoughtful."

"I got all the other stuff back at my place," Casey says hastily. "Y'know, sheets and blankets and stuff. I couldn't carry it all, so..."

They all look at each other. New, never-slept-on-by-strangers bedding is an unheard-of extravagance.

Splinter folds his white pillowcase, stands, and bows. "Thank you, Mr. Jones," he says. "We are in your debt."

* * *

The presence of the fruit is driving him crazy. He can't sit here any longer, looking at it and not eating it.

"Hey," he says to Casey. "Wanna show you something."

The two of them go out of the warm kitchen, cross the main room, and stand in a chamber dominated by a gigantic cistern.

Raph crosses his arms and fixes his gaze on the tank. "Wanna take this apart," he says, as though verbalizing his intent will cause the Universe to rearrange itself to make this action possible.

Casey mirrors Raph's pose. "Gonna need a heck of a saw."

"Know where I can get one?" Raph asks.

"Know a guy who might have one," Casey says.

They both nod at the cistern. Just once, down and up.

* * *

Raph and Don glare at Leo and Mike, and the two remaining behind swear with their eyes that they will absolutely not touch the fruit until everyone is present. Then Raph and Don go out, showing their friends the routes away from the new Lair.

"What a pleasant evening," Splinter says, and his sons murmur agreement.

* * *

They argue loudly over the division of the fruit. Leo threatens to quarter every last grape so there can be no accusations of unfairness. After that they rapidly reach consensus.

Don doesn't even know what he's eating, but it's delicious and he wants to eat them until he's made up for all the ones he hasn't eaten in his life to date.

Mike has managed to get the orange _and_ the banana. He's eating them alternately and carrying on a dialogue with himself about which one is better.

Raph declares that peaches from wherever-the-hell are now his favorite fruit, beating out his previous favorite of Slightly Damaged Apples.

Splinter eats the suspiciously prickly fruit that was hiding under the strawberries, and which nobody else was brave enough to try. He doesn't say a word.

After another argument, they agree to leave the rest of the fruit for the next morning. They all make mutual assurances of non-fruit-touching.

They all cast furtive glances at the unguarded basket.

Splinter orders them all to their rooms, and forbids them to come near the kitchen again until breakfast.


	2. Two

Two

_The Ancient One doesn't just sense the attack on the Lair; he senses the ripples of it __**moving backwards through time**__. Of course, he doesn't tell Leo this, and so Leo spends the entire journey absolutely sick with worry over what, if anything, he'll find when he gets back to New York. By the time the ship sights that beautiful archipelago, Leo is ready to jump overboard, convinced he can swim faster than this thrice-damned diesel-guzzler. The hours between that moment and the moment when it's finally safe to sneak out of the hold are some of the longest and most agonizing of his life. _

_He goes to the Lair first, virtually walking through walls to shave minutes off his travel time. The place is a wreck, but it's a very recent wreck. Leo falls to his knees and blesses the Ancient One a thousand times over for his wonderful precognitive abilities. Then he rises and goes to find his family._

* * *

They all stare forlornly at the basket. The pineapple is visibly soft and wilted. The strawberries have shriveled into black pods that shed scurf onto the bright tissue paper. The watermelon half has simply liquefied inside its plastic cling-film.

"I don't understand," Don says. His tone suggests that he is waiting for someone to explain it to him.

Leo knows he should open the cabinet and get the cereal. But he can't bear to offer his brothers sand when they've just been robbed of gold.

He tears his eyes from the rotten and puddled fruit, and walks out.

* * *

He doesn't want to say _I told you so_.

He didn't, really. He'd argued in favor of eating the fruit all at once, but the possibility that it might melt into goo overnight had never been part of his platform.

Even so, Mike can feel his brothers putting the words in his mouth as he cleans up the sticky mess.

* * *

_As soon as Don determined that the pipes and water tanks were no longer connected to anything outside this abandoned, insular pump station, he began stripping them down and turning them into other things. _

_Apparently devices for detecting impurities in water are also very good at detecting unwanted visitors in sewer tunnels. _

_To Leo, this is nothing short of alchemy. He would gladly sit and watch Donatello make miracles all day, but he has his own work to do. _

_During daylight hours, Leo and Mike engage in an endless battle for cleanliness. The grime has a long headstart on them. The new Lair is thick with wet, sludgy dust and colonized by a colorful array of enterprising fungi. Leo and Mike claim back the territory in the name of sanitation-loving creatures, one square foot at a time. _

_At night, junkyard runs. Furniture. Kitchen utensils. First-aid equipment. Donatello's laundry list of tech treasures, ranging from the mundane to the fantastic. _

_In the wee hours, quiet conversation. And then, sleep. _

_Late in the morning, training. After a light breakfast from their limited stores of food, Leo and Mike sort the previous night's haul, and insert their new possessions into the clean parts of their home. _

_And then they resume the slow, lemon-scented march._

* * *

Mike doesn't know where Leo is.

Well, it's a difficult question. _Physically_, Leo is right next to him, determinedly scraping years of accumulated gunk off the wall.

_Mentally_, who knows.

He might be wondering what color the wall is, under all the dirt. He might be trying to guess how long it will take to clean this space and convert it into a second bathroom. He might be wishing he were doing anything other than fire-bombing a tenacious mold colony with household products that would probably burn his skin off if he touched them directly.

Really, who can tell?

It feels like Leo is still ten thousand miles away.

And Mike doesn't know how to begin bridging that distance.

* * *

Raph is alone a lot these days.

His job is to do the tedious electrical work of hooking up all the little devices that Don is churning out. And Don is churning out so many of them, Raph is convinced the brainiac is running a damn sweatshop behind that plywood screen.

(Raph built that screen. "What the hell d'you need it for?" he'd demanded.

"I can't think with all this empty space," Don had said, gesturing to the cavernous central room. "It makes me nervous.")

Every morning Don hands him a cardboard box full of gadgets that came off yesterday's assembly line, and Raph goes out into the tunnels to install them at strategic points. It keeps him busy for hours.

When he gets home, he pitches the cardboard box over the screen. Sometimes he's rewarded with a satisfying _thomp_ as the box bounces off Don's head.

Then he goes and prowls around the cistern room, imagining what the space will look like when he's done with it.

* * *

Don doesn't know about the natural life-cycle of bedsheets.

He doesn't know that they start out stiff and scratchy, become soft and comfortable, and then shuffle senescently into the realm of the ragged and threadbare.

He's only ever known the third stage. He assumes that this is not how bedsheets start out, but until now it's only been an untested hypothesis.

He falls asleep at his workstation, the empty pillowcase under his head, his warm cheek slowly ironing out the creases.

* * *

_Mattresses are easy to find, but difficult to transport. _

_The first one they manage to drag home goes, without discussion, to Master Splinter. _

_Leo makes sure the second one goes to Mikey, even though Mike would rather sleep on broken glass with his brothers than on the finest feather bed alone. _

_Raph has already managed to rig up a new hammock out of who-knows-what, so Leo tries to delegate the third mattress to Don, but Don argues that, for the time being, he's much more likely to fall asleep where he's working than to actually make it to bed. The rest of the family agrees, neatly cornering Leo into taking the mattress for himself. _

_They haven't gotten a fourth mattress yet. When they do, Leo will make sure Don uses it regularly._


	3. Three

Three

_He lived with the Ancient One for just over six months so, counting travel time, he hasn't seen his family in almost eight months. He's unspeakably grateful to have them all safe and in one place, but at the same time he's nervous about the conversation he knows is coming. _

_They didn't exactly part on the best terms. _

_Mike, who was usually loath to let a brother out of shouting distance for any length of time, was oddly ambivalent. Don was detached, helping with preparations for the journey while avoiding the actual subject of Leo's absence. _

_Raph barely said goodbye. _

_He knew they had been worried about him, but it was a dutiful kind of worry that was thin disguise for the anger, hurt, and disappointment underneath. He still doesn't know whether they felt that way because of what he had failed to do, or because of how he had acted after. _

_He doesn't know how they feel now. _

_He knows that eight months is a long time, and that things change, even for people who haven't gone on soul-searching journeys to the other side of the planet. _

_He doesn't know whether there's still a place for him in their lives._

* * *

Training is hard.

Raph expected it to be hard, but he expected it to be hard in a different way.

Leo needed to go get his problems sorted out. Fine. To accommodate him, they'd spent eight months learning how to fight as three.

(Somewhere deep inside, Raph is grateful that they learned this when the situation was only temporary. But still, it was something he hadn't wanted to ever have to learn, and if Leo had just gotten over his crazy failure complex, the whole thing could have been avoided.)

Now they need to learn again how to fight as four. Splinter won't let them slide back into their old habits. He makes them begin from the first lessons, learning it new and learning it better.

("Re-entering the material at a higher level," he calls it.)

Okay. Raph would have been deluding himself if he'd believed their Sensei would ever allow that kind of lazy half-mastery.

But the point is, _Leo's not helping_.

He's not doing _anything_. He's going through all the motions, but the teamwork vibe just isn't there.

They practice fighting back-to-back, their younger brothers playing the part of the assailants. Leo is doing a textbook job fending off Mike. It's all very straightforward until Splinter comes around their side and lobs a half-deflated tennis ball at them.

Raph doesn't know who's supposed to block it.

He gets Don's bo in a lock and exerts his greater leverage, dragging his 'enemy' around to serve as a shield. At the same time, Leo reverses his sword and brings it up, angling the flat to deflect the ball.

And almost driving the point through Don's head.

Thank god Don has the presence of mind to release his weapon and jump out of the way.

The tennis ball bounces off Raph's shoulder.

They all stand there, frozen, staring at each other.

"I'm sorry," Leo says.

* * *

Don stares, unseeing, at the gadget on his desk.

In a quantum way, Leo and Raph both did the right thing. They protected themselves from enemy fire.

The point is, only one of them needed to do it. It's an either/or, with an implied _but not both_.

They all have scars from each other's weapons. Don doesn't care whether or not he has a blade-thin line by his ear.

But Leo's sword was attempting to occupy the same space as Don's brain.

Physically impossible.

Don knows his brain is protected by several layers of bone and cushioning membranes.

He also knows exactly how sharp a katana is.

He blinks, and his eyes slide right back out of focus.

He doesn't know how to make this thing work.

* * *

"I'm sorry," Leo says again, even though the only one listening is Mike's cat.

Klunk is staring at the eviscerated husk of a console, all that remains after Don came through and removed all the interesting functional bits. Sooner or later he'll probably come back and turn the structural parts into a car or something.

Klunk isn't so much sitting as crouching upright. Her ears are forward, and it looks as though she might pounce at any moment.

Leo follows her gaze, wondering if there's a bug crawling around. He can't see anything moving.

Without warning, Klunk puffs up to twice her normal size, makes a 180-degree spin in mid-air, and streaks out of the room.

Leo drops his eyes. Apparently even cats don't want to be around him anymore.

* * *

Although he hates himself for it, Splinter finds himself wishing Leonardo hadn't come back.

Even after hearing Leonardo's explanation, Splinter thinks it's little short of miraculous that his son arrived back in New York less than a day after Karai's attack.

He's glad that they are able to make their new home as a family, without one of their number missing. And he can't deny that Leonardo's attitude is much improved.

But he knows that his younger sons could have regrouped and started over on their own, and he thinks it would have been good for them.

And the process of welcoming Leonardo back, of folding him into the changed fabric of their lives, is so, so difficult.

Maybe a longer absence would have only made it worse. But he can't help thinking that Leonardo's journey is only half-finished, and that something important has been left unlearned.

* * *

Mike doesn't want to know.

He just doesn't want to know.

He sits on the floor, sorting the things they brought home last night, and tries not to think of anything else. If he does, his mind will start worrying away at the problem of exactly what Leo was doing in training this morning.

Yeah. There it goes.

Leo is very conscious of his blades. He knows the kind of serious, inadvertent harm they can inflict. He won't let anyone who isn't a trained fighter touch them.

(April did, once, just the hilt, and received a lecture full of so many dire warnings that, when she began her training with Master Splinter, she was afraid to pick up _any_ weapon.)

Leo knows exactly how long his swords are, feels them as extensions of his arms. So, as hard as Mike tries to divert his mental train onto a different track, it keeps rattling to the same conclusion: Leo knew where his sword was.

Which leaves only one justification (_no no Leo is not homicidal that's not even a possibility_): Leo _didn't_ know where Don was.

An abject failure of teamwork training.

They haven't been going on patrol, exactly, but they have been making regular trips to that perilous place known as The Surface. Until today, Mike had just been assuming that Leo had his back, the way he always did.

Now Leo is a loose cannon, a gun with a crooked sight, a grenade that detonates too soon.

It's painful to even think it, but: Mike can't trust him.

* * *

It's three miles to the junkyard they decided to hit tonight. Nobody says a word until they're underneath it and Raph's hand is on the ladder.

"I'm not going," Leo says.

Raph stares at him. "What, you're just gonna stand down here?"

"I... have to do something else," Leo says vaguely, glancing down the tunnel in the opposite direction from how they came.

Raph shakes his head. "Whatever. Come on," he says to his sane brothers.

* * *

And they're right back where they started. Leo makes a mistake, goes all distant, and starts doing weird stuff without telling anybody why.

Well, fine. He can just run around the sewer tunnels until his legs fall off.

Raph realizes he's holding a glass jar. The label says APRICOTS. He throws it as hard as he can. When it lands, it makes a satisfying _kirrssh_.

* * *

It's not the same at all.

It's the difference between doing something you shouldn't have, and _not_ doing something you _should_ have.

You can't apologize for something you didn't do. You still have to do it.

He didn't protect his family. That means he has to work twice as hard to see they don't get hurt again.

This morning was a mistake of the first kind. He has to make up for it.

Leo runs faster.

* * *

Don and Raph can't get the power to stop conking out at odd moments. It always fixes itself, after minutes or hours, but it's still annoying.

Don says there must be a flip-flop he hasn't found yet.

Whatever that means.

They're sitting in the dark and, though no one is saying it, they're all wondering which will come back first: the lights, or Leo.

Mike's money is on the lights. But he doesn't care enough to wait up and find out. Someone will tell him in the morning.

"I'm going to bed," he says.

"Me too," says Raph.

* * *

Don listens to his brothers heading to their rooms.

"Will you also retire, my son?" Splinter asks.

"Not yet," Don says.

As much as he'd like to get the wiring problem sorted out, the darkness is comforting. He can't see the yawning vastness of the room, and so he doesn't feel it sucking away his thoughts, doesn't worry about how he's going to build enough things to make the place feel full and lived-in. The darkness boxes him in, and he draws pictures on the black walls of his mind.

"I think I will wait in the kitchen," Splinter says.

Don hears him go, his new cane tapping against the floor. He lies down, feeling the reverberations through his body. Maybe he'll just close his eyes for a minute.

* * *

He wakes up. For five seconds everything is dark and silent. Then, at the same moment, Leo and the lights come back.

Leo is dragging something twice his own size.

"For you," he pants. "I wrapped it... in plastic... so it wouldn't... get wet."

Leo lets the mattress fall. It hits the ground with a heavy _floomph_.

"You didn't have to do that by yourself," Don says.

"I wanted to," Leo says.

* * *

"I'm sorry," Leo says. "I'm sorry. I'll stand here and say it all night."

"You don't have to do that either," Don says.

"I want to," Leo says.

* * *

Don is still lying on the floor.

"Are you going to sleep there?" Leo asks.

"I don't think I'm going to make it anywhere else tonight," Don says.

Leo unwraps the mattress and pushes it over next to Don. "Please use it?"

Don lets his head fall to the side. Six vertical inches seems like an impossible distance. He stares at the off-white cliffs for a long minute. Then he rolls over.

"Okay," he says, his voice muffled by the padding. "I'm using it."

"Good night," Leo says.

"G'night," Don mumbles.

Leo and the lights go out.


	4. Four

Four

_When they pool their resources, that first night, the result is pitiful. _

_In comparison to what the rest of them have to show, Leo's knapsack is a veritable cornucopia of riches. _

_First are the things he brought as gifts: the ornate walking stick for Splinter, and carved trinkets for his brothers. _

_Then, the things that are infinitely more valuable: two sets of warm clothes, some food left over from the journey, a bedroll, a little bundle of money. _

_From this, they will begin again._

* * *

Leo has been looking forward to group meditation but, in light of recent events, Master Splinter is understandably more interested in their combat skills than in their psychic prowess.

However, after yesterday's incident, Splinter seems to think that sitting quietly and connecting spiritually is just what his sons need.

They sit in their customary semi-circle, facing the Sensei, and he instructs them to reach out for each other's energy.

Leo's meditative skills grew by leaps and bounds during his time with the Ancient One. Now, when he slips into a meditative trance, he can sense the life force of all the growing, breathing things around him.

He can't wait to find out what his brothers feel like.

He breathes deeply, clears his mind, and rises to a higher plane.

_Yes._ This energy is familiar, but so much stronger and clearer than what he was able to sense before. He looks at the four glowing spheres around his astral self, and names them in his mind.

There's another energy source on the edge of his consciousness. He looks with his mind's eye. Outside their circle, he sees an icy cloud of mist.

It's self-contained, not approaching. He doesn't sense malevolence from it.

But he doesn't recognize it at all.

He retreats into the blue warmth of Mike's energy, and stays there, watching the cloud with suspicious eyes, until the meditation session is over.

* * *

Mike tries to clear his mind for meditation, he really does, but all he can think of is the sad blankness of their new living space, of the space he is sitting in right now.

Okay, technically, imagining an empty room is not the same as emptying your mind. But it makes him think of something he can do to make the place _theirs_.

He puts the idea in a box and pushes the box far into the back of his mind.

Time to meditate for real.

Master Splinter can always tell when he's faking.

* * *

Their security system is infuriatingly primitive.

When a sensor is triggered, it sets off an ear-splitting car alarm in the Lair, and lights up a bulb in an array to tell him where the signal is coming from.

That's all it does.

He needs to find a decent computer.

But first, he really needs to track down that faulty circuit. He's had about enough of the random brown-outs.

* * *

"Leo?"

Leo is standing in the middle of the room, scanning every corner of it with the Secret Ninja Gaze for spotting things that are trying to hide. "Hm?"

Mike holds up a marker. "Can we make a new shadow-wall?"

Leo blinks at him. "Now?"

"It'll only take a minute..."

Leo gazes at the tangle of pipes crisscrossing the ceiling. "Okay."

* * *

Leo presses him against the lemon-scented wall, uncaps the marker, and starts drawing a careful line around the curve of his shoulder.

Mike raises his arms, and Leo continues tracing down his side to the outside of his leg. Then he does the other side.

"Okay," Leo says, and pokes the marker into Mike's hand.

Mike backs up a pace, wields the marker like a paintbrush, and fills in the missing parts of the oval. Then he slashes an artistic _M_ inside his shadow, and inscribes the date.

Leo measures the oval's long axis with his thumb. "26 inches," he says. "What was it last time?"

"Don't remember," Mike says. He twiddles the marker. "Want me to do yours?"

"Sure," Leo says.

* * *

Raph throws the cardboard box over the wooden wall. There's no _thomp_, because Donnie isn't there, but it's satisfying anyway.

Because it's the _last box_.

Don has been messing with the wiring all day, which means that he _hasn't_ been making any more security devices, which means that tomorrow there will not be any gadgets for Raph to install.

Just to be sure, Raph peeks around the screen. Yup. The child labor force has been sent home, and there's no sign that Don has been doing any work that will lead to more work for Raph.

"Raph!"

Raph turns to see Mike coming at him with a marker. Normally, he would not consider a marker to be a dangerous weapon, but in this case…

"Come on!" Before he can resist, Mike drags him to the wall by the kitchen, where the concrete is suddenly decorated with two darkly-outlined ovals. Mike makes him stand there, his back to the room, like the third guy waiting to be frisked, while he traces the outline of Raph's shell. "There," he says, when he's done. "Now put your name on it."

Raph takes the marker and scribbles his name inside the oval. "Can I go now?"

"Yeah, sure," Mike says. And then he goes to lie in wait for Donnie.

* * *

When Don returns, late in the afternoon, Mike immediately accosts him and does to him what he already did to Leo and Raph.

The family gathers, and looks at the four shadows on the wall.

"Now it's home," Mike says.

* * *

After dark they go to visit Casey. The window is open. They're expected.

Leo lets his brothers go first, then casts a final glance over the neighboring buildings, and follows them in. He closes the window behind him, even though the weather is warm.

"Yo!" Raph shouts.

"Yo yourself!" Casey shouts back. He appears in the kitchen doorway. "You guys want something to drink?"

* * *

They sit around drinking soda and shooting the breeze.

"I've been bashing twice as many Dragons to make up for you guys bein' busy with other stuff," Casey says.

Real friends fight your enemies for you when you can't do it yourself.

* * *

"You wanna see the stuff?" Casey says.

They do.

They all go into the hall and Casey opens the closet and fluffy things spill out, tumbling over themselves and bouncing off the opposite wall of the narrow passage.

Raph picks up a flat red package. "What'd you get these for?" he says. "I don't use a bed."

"I didn't want you to feel left out," Casey says.

They'll think of something to do with them.

* * *

There's so much of it.

They're all trying to guess how much it cost, and they're all trying not to, because the number will be a big one and they'll have to tell him to take everything back.

They're rescued by Casey's inability to keep his mouth shut.

"They're Irregulars," he blurts. "Y'know, the ones that didn't come out exactly like all the others, so most people don't want 'em, but there's nothin' wrong with 'em really..."

He trails off awkwardly.

"It's okay," Mike says. "We're Irregulars too."

* * *

After a while they start really looking at the jumbled heap, wondering how they're going to carry it all home.

"We should be on our way," Leo says, when the soda bottles are nearly empty and the conversation has wandered to an idiotic trade the Yankees made last week.

His brothers finish their drinks and go over to the pile, picking up soft bundles and balancing them experimentally against shoulders and hips.

It quickly becomes apparent that this will require a Strategy.

* * *

This would all be a lot easier with a vehicle, but no one dares to mention it, because Don would probably have to kill them.

(It occurs to Mike that they are still in possession of a helicopter. He wonders whether anybody would notice if they tried to land it on the roof of Casey's building.)

Finally Casey finds a coil of rope, and they tie the blankets onto their backs. Raph carries Splinter's blanket in his arms. Mike and Leo take two pillows each, leaving Don to carry the last pillow and the five packages of sheets, tied together in a neat bundle.

They all determinedly say nothing about how stupid they look.

* * *

"Did you talk to the guy?" Raph asks on the way out.

Casey makes a strained expression, indicating that he's thinking. "What guy?"

"Don't flake out on me, Case."

"Oh! The _guy_!" Casey shakes his head, like he can't believe he forgot. "Yeah, he's got one I can borrow. I'll bring it over. Day after tomorrow, maybe."

"Thanks, Case," Raph says. He bounces the blanket in his arms. "And for the stuff."

"Hey," Casey says, and makes an off-hand gesture.

"Yeah," Raph says, and goes to catch up with his brothers.

* * *

Raph helps carry the mattress upstairs, and stands around while Don puts the sheets on it.

"Y'know," he says. "I always wondered something."

"What?" Don asks.

"Look, here."

Don turns around. Raph hits him in the face with a pillow.

"Yeah," Raph says. "It _is_ more fun with a new one."

Don grabs the pillow and swings it at Raph's head. It connects with a satisfying _whump_ sound.

"You're right," he says.

* * *

Purple.

Black.

Purple.

Black.

Every time the lights go on, he can see the purple plain of the pillowcase stretching out in front of his eye.

Purple.

He spent most of the morning going over every inch of wiring in the Lair, and most of the afternoon tracing the lines back through the sewer tunnels, as far as he dared during daylight hours.

Black.

He couldn't find anything wrong.

Purple.

So why are the lights still flashing on and off?

Black.

"Sorry, guys," he'd told his brothers. "I'll keep working on it."

Purple.

Black.

Now he'll have to isolate the circuit, hook up a generator...

Purple.

"Stop!" he shouts.

Black.

Black.

Black.


	5. Five

Five

_On the last night of his first life, what to do with four baby turtles is not even a question, and gathering them into a tin prison to eat later represents the pinnacle of intelligent problem-solving. _

_On the first morning of his second life, everything is different. _

_He is so much larger. Strange things are happening inside his mind. _

_And the four turtles, also larger, are lying against him with perfect trust. _

_Suddenly he knows a justice that is different than the fear of death, and a love that is more than simple affinity for a source of good things. _

_He goes out to find breakfast for five mouths._

* * *

On the first morning of his second life, he woke up in a pile of old newspapers.

Today, he wakes up on a mattress his sons brought home for him, beneath a blanket that is gray by design and not from someone else's rubbed-in dirt.

He slides out from between the sheets and silently goes upstairs.

* * *

Donatello is sprawled across the bed as though he fell asleep two steps before reaching it.

Michelangelo's blanket is rucked up, his hands clutching multiple folds, as though he is trying to touch and possess every square inch of the fabric.

Raphael, sometime during the night, had thrown his new pillow to the floor, and replaced it with the flat, limp one he had salvaged from someone's curb on bulk day. He had not bothered to transfer the red pillowcase.

Leonardo is lying on his stomach, face towards the wall, utterly unreadable.

Splinter turns to go.

"Sensei..." Leonardo says.

Splinter stops. "Yes, my son?"

He hears Leonardo sit up. "Do you think there's something... strange, about this place?"

Splinter faces his son. "What do you mean?"

Leonardo traces a seam of the blanket. Every stitch is perfect and intact. "I..." He falls silent again. He's been unusually taciturn lately, speaking little, saying almost nothing about his journey. "When we meditated yesterday," he begins softly, "I saw something, that I haven't seen before. I feel like... like something is here..."

"The freezing mist?" Splinter suggests.

Leonardo looks up. "Yes. Yes. What _is_ it, Sensei?"

"It is..." He thinks about how to explain it. "It is an old energy, my son. An echo of others who have been here. These... mists, were in our previous homes as well. You just could not see them."

"Then it's like the refrigerator, and the water pumps," Leonardo says. "Just something left behind."

"Yes," Splinter says. "It cannot hurt you."

Leonardo nods thoughtfully. "Thank you, Sensei."

Splinter turns to go.

He thinks the energy-echoes in this place are unusually sad.

But he will not mention that.

* * *

Apparently they weren't ready for combat techniques, so today it's simple teamwork exercises.

Two steps back.

Mike walks forward across the Lair. Raph's hands. Don's hands. Leo's hands. At any given moment he's balancing on two brothers while the third circles around to catch his next footstep.

He can't really think of a context in which they would actually need to pull off a maneuver like this, but Splinter told them to do it and if any of them asked why he'd probably only give them the look that says _Because I'm the Sensei_.

At least this one isn't sadistically complicated. It'll all be over in another fifteen feet.

Raph's hands. Don's hands. Leo's hands.

His brothers make a staircase for him to walk down.

"Very good," Splinter says. "Now Raphael."

They all groan.

* * *

Don doesn't really think his work on the generator deserves an audience.

"Don't you have anything better to do?" he asks.

Raph shrugs. "My in-box is empty."

"I'm sure you can find other employment," Don says witheringly. "For example," he tucks a yellow-handled screwdriver under his knee and extracts Klunk from the generator's interior for the fifth time, "as chief feline supervisor."

Raph scruffs the cat and plunks her into his lap. "What're you going to run this thing off of?"

Don smirks. "I'm going to make Mike run on a wheel."

Raph snorts. Klunk jumps over his folded legs and darts back inside the machinery. "I like it."

"Seriously, though." Don untangles Klunk from a series of fan belts and places her firmly on the floor, as far from his work as he can reach. "It's going to have to be a hand-crank for now."

"How often?" Raph asks, pinning Klunk down with his hand before she can employ any more infiltration tactics.

"Maybe twice a day." Don glances up. "I'm sure that won't be a problem, since you seem to have so much free time."

"I can think of nothing I'd rather do," Raph says solemnly.

Don reaches under his bent knee, but finds only floor. "Where's my screwdriver?" he asks.

Raph rolls Klunk over, seeing if she's managed to abscond with it.

"Never mind," Don says. "I have another."

He gets up and goes to his workspace.

Right in the middle of the desk is a yellow-handled screwdriver.

* * *

They'd managed to clean off three walls of the bathroom-in-potentia.

(Underneath, dull yellow paint. Mike had secretly been hoping for mosaics of girls wearing very little, but by now he should be used to not always getting the things he wants.)

They'd also cleaned the bank of lockers occupying the fourth wall. Now they're supposed to be moving the lockers, but neither of them is in a hurry to do it, because they really don't want to see what's growing behind them.

"I'll take this end," Leo says finally.

Between them they manage to pry up the heavy old thing. It isn't bolted down, but it sticks from old spills or fungal excrescences or maybe just from habit.

The doors all flop open, making it difficult to navigate the contraption out of the small space. They dump it in the main room and only then do they let themselves look at the back of it.

It looks like somebody has stapled a black bear-skin rug to the metal.

"Do you think we can eat any of this stuff?" Mike asks.

Leo looks ill.

* * *

"Okay," Don says. "Here goes nothing."

The lights go off. They listen to Don reconnecting wires, and then the lights go on.

"Well," says Raph. "That was exciting."

* * *

In the junkyard, Mike watches his own back.

Leo has lost that deep internal knowledge that makes their teamwork, well, _work_. Everything he does is mechanical, disconnected. His spirit just isn't in it.

So even though Leo has posted himself on top of a nearby trash heap, and stilled himself into the stony pose of the lookout, Mike watches his own back.

"Check it out." Raph shows him an ornate antique box, opening it to reveal a jumble of thread in diverse colors, a packet of tiny silver needles, some threatening-looking scissors, a tape measure. "Somebody was cleaning out Grandma's attic." He snaps the box closed. "What'd you find?"

Mike offers the towels he picked up. Only a little frayed around the edges, with a few small holes.

"Cool." Raph glances over at Donnie, who has been pacing around, his head bent low. Every so often he swoops down, snatches something off the ground, and tucks it into the cardboard box under his arm.

"Here." Raph holds out the sewing box, and Mike juggles the towels to take it. "Think I saw some spoons."

Raph turns away, retracing his steps across the garbage piles.

Mike watches his back.

* * *

They come home. They sit in the kitchen, talking about nothing of consequence.

There's one less chair now, since Don stole one for his lab. Mike has been thinking of stealing two more, just so that, when the whole family is in the kitchen, empty chairs will be the minority.

(Sometimes, when he's feeling ambitious, he thinks about stealing six of the chairs, so that when everyone sat down there wouldn't be _any_ empty places. But he doesn't have any place to put the chairs, except for his room, and he doesn't really like the idea of having six empty chairs watching him while he sleeps.)

Splinter announces that he's going to bed. They wish him good night.

Shortly after, Leo also decides to turn in. "See you guys in the morning," he says, and heads upstairs.

* * *

A minute later he's back. He stands in the doorway, holding up his blanket.

It's stained with a sprawling blot of what looks like machine oil.

"I don't know how this happened," he says, "and I don't care. But I'm disappointed."

Raph can't believe it. Is Leo accusing them of something?

"What are you tryin' to say?" he demands.

"What I'm trying to say," Leo says, with forced restraint, "is that when we're lucky enough to have nice things, maybe we should try to keep them in good condition. Just for a little while."

He's not going to listen to this stupid lecture. "Nobody touched your damn blanket," he says heatedly. "Don't -"

"I don't want to hear it," Leo says. "I'm going over to April's. I'll be back later."

He folds up the blanket and marches off. A minute later they hear the door open and close.

"What the hell was that?" Raph says.

Mike and Don just shake their heads.

* * *

She's halfway down the stairs when she hears the dryer running. It takes her another two steps to remember she's not doing any laundry.

She drops the bag of garbage and clenches her fists the way Master Splinter showed her. _This way you will hurt the enemy and not yourself._

That's when she realizes that there's a very limited set of people who would break into her building just to use her laundry machines.

"Hi, April."

She feels like a fool, but her heart is still racing. "For goodness sakes, Leo," she says. "You could have come up and said hello."

"I didn't want to bother you," he says.

He sounds so lost.

* * *

She walks down and sits next to him, careful because she can't see him.

"It's hard," she says.

"What?" he says.

She leans the back of her head against the wall. "Going away. Coming back."

The dryer hums.

"I never went to summer camp as a kid," she says. "I was never away from my family for more than a few days. Then in high school I went on an exchange program for a year. I went to France. I didn't know anyone."

"But at least you could call home," Leo says.

"I didn't very often," she says. She can feel Leo's shock, that she would willingly forego communication with her family, so she adds, "Because of the time difference, and because it was expensive."

He doesn't say anything.

"When I came home," she says, "it was like I didn't know them anymore. You..." She thinks. "The first time you move out of the house, and then come back, it's hard to figure out your relationship with your parents. What authority they have over you."

She wishes she could see him.

"And with my sister... it was a long time before I talked to her again, the way I had before. She grew up a lot that year. She was at that age." She nudges him with her shoulder. "And she didn't have her big sister bossing her around anymore."

The dryer hums.

"What do you do?" he asks finally. "How do you put the pieces back together?"

"Just give it time," she says. "Recognize that you've changed, and so have they. Learn to love the people they are now, and trust that they'll do the same for you."

"Thanks, April," he says.

"Any time," she says.


	6. Six

Six

_Shortly after the first Lair collapsed, Don laid down a new rule: they would all maintain "evac bags", duffels or backpacks containing their most essential possessions, which could be grabbed quickly in the event of an emergency. For the first few months he was obsessive about the new protocol, regularly demanding to inspect his brothers' material preparedness. _

_In theory, everyone should have been keeping his shell-cell in his evac bag, when he was not keeping it on his person. _

_In practice, they grew lax in their habits and took to putting down their phones wherever. _

_And so in actuality, when Karai destroyed the second Lair, only Don had a fully-packed bag in a convenient location. _

_Of course, this didn't help him when he had to make a secondary escape from the Shell Sub. _

_Now none of them have a phone. _

_The good news is, the relay system that makes the shell-cells work survived Karai's attack. _

_The better news is, they're all still alive. _

_Phones can be replaced. Brothers can't._

* * *

The car alarm lets out a volley of loud, attention-getting sounds.

In less than ten seconds the room is full of ninjas ready for battle.

"What is it, Donnie?" Leo shouts over the din.

"I don't know!" Don shouts back, poking at the alarm until it shuts up and watching the bulbs flash in sequence. "Do you see a video monitor here?"

They all try to listen through the ringing in their ears.

"It is Mr. Jones," Splinter says.

They all let out a breath and lower their weapons.

"Moron," Raph mutters.

* * *

A few minutes later they've rescued Casey from wandering lost through the sewer tunnels, and brought him into the Lair.

"Couldn't find the door," Casey admits.

They know. Disguising it was one of their first priorities.

(Mike had suggested they could kill two pigeons with one kunai by cutting a slab of gunk off an interior wall and moving it wholesale to the outside of the door. The others vetoed this on the grounds that it was disgusting.)

Casey can't stay long. He's just come to deliver something.

"You guys know it's freezing in here?" he says, as he puts the thing down.

They look around, as if the temperature will suddenly become visible.

"Feels okay to me," Raph says.

Casey shakes his head. "Whatever you say." He points at the thing. "Don't keep it too long, okay? My friend wants it back."

"Yeah, I got it," Raph says.

"Okay," Casey says. "I gotta go to work."

* * *

It looks like a suitcase, if suitcases were often designed to withstand direct hits from artillery shells.

"What is it?" Mike asks.

"It's mine," Raph says.

"Yeah, but what _is_ it?" Mike persists.

"Since you are all awake," Master Splinter puts in, "perhaps we should begin our training."

* * *

Splinter sets them to playing Memory Telephone. He teaches the first Turtle a sequence of moves, and watches as the message is passed from one to the next. If the sequence is conveyed correctly to the end of the line, then the last Turtle is able to defeat Master Splinter in a sparring match. If the message gets garbled, or if the last Turtle cheats by improvising, then they all have to do ten flips.

The Turtles rotate positions after every round, and try to figure out where mistakes are being introduced.

When they have managed to defeat him four times in a row, Splinter ends the training session.

* * *

Leo makes a concerted effort to be pleasant at breakfast, and it doesn't go unnoticed.

"Someone got up on the right side of the bed," Raph comments.

"I'm sorry about last night," Leo says. "I know you guys didn't do it. Probably Klunk got into something and then decided to take a nap on my bed."

Mike thinks this is an unfair slight against his cat, but in the interest of preserving the general good mood he doesn't say anything.

"I over-reacted," Leo says. "I washed the blanket and the stain came out. I'm sorry I yelled at you guys."

They forgive him.

* * *

After breakfast they all watch Raph open the suitcase.

"What is that?" Leo asks.

"Raph," Don says slowly. "Why did Casey bring you a band saw?"

Raph just smirks at them, fires up the saw, and disappears into the cistern room. He proceeds to make a godawful racket. Every so often he emerges, carrying an enormous piece of metal, which he lays on the floor outside Don's work area.

Mike thinks this is a better present than the things Klunk _does_ sometimes leave on beds.

But only marginally.

* * *

Don hides behind his plywood screen, trying to focus through the whirring and screeching and whining and clanging.

Now that the power seems to be fixed, he's back to making small devices. Today he's retrofitting discarded cell phones to work with his relay system, and to be convenient for Turtle hands.

And Raph keeps bringing him pieces of the water tank.

The next time he hears the thunder-sound of a big piece of metal being thrown onto a pile of other big pieces of metal, he sighs, stands up, and goes to peer around the edge of the screen.

"Raph," he says, "what is it that you want me to do with this?"

"Up to you, Brainiac," Raph says. "Sure you'll think of something."

"Listen," Don says. "What I really need now is a computer."

Raph makes a gesture that encompasses the whole Lair. "What, all this tech and no computer?"

"Well, it depends what you mean by computer," Don says, leaning against the wooden wall. "There are lots of things that contain microchips, and have inputs and outputs, and can perform useful calculations. But there's nothing that will connect to the internet, or support text-editing, or run Mike's games."

"Humans are so inconsiderate," Raph says.

"So I want to look for one tonight," Don says.

"Consider it done," Raph says, and goes back to his mysterious project.

Don returns to the shelter of his screened alcove.

There are three fully-assembled shell-cells sitting on his desk.

Funny. He only remembers finishing two.

* * *

The lines of communication finally seem to be open again, so Mike attempts friendly conversation.

"It must suck," he says.

"What?" Leo says.

"Living with the Ancient One, in his mountain-castle-thing, and then coming back here and scraping mushrooms off sewer walls."

Leo goes very still. "Do you think I was on vacation, Mike? Do you think I wasn't lonely? Do you think I didn't do any work?"

"Um..."

"Because you couldn't be more wrong."

"How am I supposed to know?" Mike says. "You never talk about it."

Leo's fingers tighten on the handle of his scraper. "What do you want me to say?"

"I don't know. Anything. What was it _like_? What did you _do_?"

"It was... I..." Leo sighs. "If I tell you, am I going to have to repeat it for everyone else?"

"Probably."

"Then I'll tell you later."

* * *

In a pause in the ruckus, a tap on the wooden wall.

"What now, Raph?" Don asks, and briefly entertains the idea of hanging a witty _Keep Out_ sign on the partition.

"I don't mean to bother you," Leo says, sticking his head around the end of the screen, "but the ceiling pipes are leaking."

The button battery he's attempting to fit back into the retooled phone slips between his fingers and goes skittering across the desk. "Can it wait?"

"Yes," Leo says. "If I move the salvage pile."

He would rather Leo just say _no_, instead of trying to be polite and inobtrusive.

"I'm coming," he says.

* * *

He climbs around in the pipes for a while, but there's no corrosion and all the joins look tight. "I don't see it, Leo," he calls down. "You're sure it was dripping from here?"

Leo and Mike pause in their work, moving odds and ends from the salvage pile into the lockers, and look up. "Pretty sure," Leo says, and toes a wet spot on the floor.

"Probably just condensation," Don says.

Although, as he slides to a place from where he can disentangle himself and jump down, the pipes seem completely dry.

* * *

They stand in The Room Formerly Known As The Cistern Room.

"That's great, Raph," Leo says uncertainly.

Raph looks at the space, clearly seeing something other than a fungus farm. What's under the water tank is even worse than what was behind the lockers. "'S gonna be our dojo," he says.

"Wonderful," Mike says sourly. "Are Leo and I gonna have to clean this too?"

"Nope," Raph says. "This one's on me."

He begins immediately, and manages to clear a sizable patch of floor by dinnertime.

Before they head out, Don tosses each of them a new shell-cell.

He doesn't say _Try not to break them_, but he can hear them all thinking it.

* * *

It's unbelievable, the things humans throw away.

Within a couple of hours, Don has acquired all the necessary parts for a computer, and some bonus peripherals.

This monitor really should be in a hazardous waste dump, but it's just sitting here in a normal junkyard. There doesn't seem to be a thing wrong with the tower, aside from the fact that it's more than five minutes old and therefore unbearably obsolete. The keyboard, mouse, and wireless router look fine too.

They've also managed to scrounge up some clothes in decent condition and a few not-quite-empty bottles of disinfectant.

They divide up the load and head home.

* * *

"And it ends with the hero throwing the bad guy off a building, and riding off with the girl," Raph says.

Mike gives Leo a significant look.

Leo spreads his hands on the table. "Guys," he says. "Can we talk about something?"

Raph leans back in his chair. "Floor's yours, bro."

"It's been brought to my attention," Leo says, "that some of you have questions about my time with the Ancient One. So... go ahead. Ask."

His brothers exchange glances.

"Well, what's he like?" Raph asks. "The Ancient One?"

Leo thinks about it. "He's very wise, and very skilled, and a very good teacher," he says. "But he's not the easiest person to get along with."

"What did you learn?" Don asks.

"I -" He realizes they probably have a lot of misconceptions on this point. "I didn't learn a lot about fighting. He didn't teach me any secret ninja tricks. We spent a lot of time..." It's hard to explain. "I just thought a lot," he says. "I know what's holding me back, and I know how to be better. But I didn't learn anything that I can teach you."

"What was the best part?" Mike asks.

Leo knows the answer to that. "The best part, and the worst part, was the isolation. I could walk around outside at any time of day and never be in danger of meeting anyone. It was good, to be safe. But for six months I didn't talk to anyone except the Ancient One."

"Was it worth it?" Raph asks.

"Yes," Leo says, without hesitation. "Because I was doing it for you."

* * *

He goes to bed feeling like a great weight has been lifted. They understand. They don't hate him.

And they're making room for him to come back.


	7. Seven

Seven

_Making a new Lair habitable is a long process with a strict hierarchy of priorities. Food, heat, and safety come first. Entertainment comes last. _

_Of course, they can only work for so many hours at a time. At the end of a long day, they rest. And they entertain themselves. _

_They have no television and no video games. They have few books - only the volumes they happened to come across when they weren't already at the limits of their carrying capacities. They don't even have a deck of cards. _

_So they play invisible chess. They tell stories. They pick meaningless issues, choose sides, and hold vigorous debates that end with everyone laughing. _

_Splinter reinstates their old game of Surprise Hide-and-Seek. _

_The rules are as follows: At any time, Splinter can initiate the game by making a soft clicking noise. When this happens, the Turtles must instantly hide, and remain in hiding until Splinter says the game is over. _

_He told them this game was about vigilance and stealth. _

_It wasn't until years later they realized he was imitating the sound of a gun being cocked._

* * *

They've graduated to sparring, even if it is without weapons.

"Didn't learn anything about fighting, huh?" Raph grunts, as he ducks under Leo's high roundhouse kick.

Raph hasn't been twiddling his thumbs for the past eight months either. Leo's underestimated how much progress his brothers have made in his absence. As a consequence, he thinks Raph's grab is just a feint, doesn't block, and finds himself flat on the floor.

"Yield," he pants, before Raph can land any more strikes.

Instead Raph offers a hand and helps him up.

"Show me that," Leo says.

Raph demonstrates the move on Mike. Leo recognizes it as a throw they all knew in theory but hadn't been able to reliably pull off.

He practices a few times, catching Mike's arm and flipping him onto his back.

"Ow," Mike says, after impacting the floor for the seventh time. "When are we getting a real dojo? Y'know, with actual _mats_?"

"Soon," Raph promises.

* * *

He stares in dismay at the floor of what, in his mind, is already the dojo.

The space he'd cleared is full of mushrooms again. In fact, they look even bigger and more closely-packed than they did yesterday.

He might not be an expert on the Fungi Kingdom, but that just doesn't seem right.

* * *

Don steps back. He has power. He has connectivity. He is once again Ruler Of The World.

"Hey Donnie?" Raph says.

"Hm?"

"You'd better come see this."

* * *

It's impossible to even tell where the boundaries of the cleared space were.

"No," Don says. "That's not normal."

"Didn't think so," Raph says.

"What did you use on them?" Don asks.

"Same stuff Mike and Leo've been using," Raph says.

"Hm," Don says.

* * *

It takes Mike a minute to figure out why he's lying very still under a tipped-over console. Then his brain catches up with his ears.

_Ch-click._

Ah.

He breathes slowly and waits for Splinter's release command.

* * *

He figures it's been about ten minutes, but that means nothing. This game can go on for hours.

He's just decided to think of it as a pleasant break from mold-scraping when he hears footsteps.

They aren't Master Splinter's.

He listens, flabbergasted. Not only is someone out of hiding, they're not even being very stealthy about it. Whoever it is walks straight across the main room.

The door opens and closes.

His jaw drops. Someone is going to be doing a _lot_ of flips.

* * *

"Who was it?" Mike demands, half an hour later, as they all come out of hiding.

"Who was what?" Don asks, dropping down from the ceiling pipes.

"_Somebody_ walked out during the game," Mike says, even though he didn't hear _somebody_ come back in and clearly everyone is here now.

"I didn't hear anything," Leo says.

"Me neither," says Raph.

"Nor I," says Master Splinter.

Mike looks at them all suspiciously.

* * *

"Now stay that way," Raph says to the re-cleaned patch of floor.

The floor says nothing.

* * *

The process of getting actual mats begins that night.

Don is standing knee-deep in water that would be shallower if he didn't keep sinking to his ankles in the mud. Tonight's mission: collect sedge from the pond above their new home, to be woven into tatami for the dojo.

Raph has generously donated his unused bedsheet as a kind of sling to carry the sedge in, and the pile on it is steadily growing. Don straightens up and tosses his bundle onto the heap.

Mike breaks the silence. "You know what I don't want to spend my whole life doing?"

Don rolls his eyes, but rises to the bait. "What?"

Mike adds his own bundle to the pile on the bedsheet. "Working in a rice paddy."

"Too bad," Raph says. "You'd fit right in. You and the water buffalo have the same stupid expression." He reaches out and flicks his finger against Mike's head.

"I may have a stupid expression," Mike shoots back, "but your stupid goes all the way through." He knocks the heel of his hand against Raph's forehead.

Raph tackles him into the deeper water.

Don turns to share a long-suffering look with his eldest brother, but Leo is glaring stormily at the noisy splashing in the otherwise quiet pond.

"Well," Don says, "I'm glad they're getting _that_ out of their system."

Leo's only reply is an indecipherable grunt.

Raph and Mike surface a minute later. Raph has Mike in a headlock and both of them are covered in mud.

Mike grapples with Raph's arm. "Okay, okay, I give!"

Raph releases him. "That was fun." He squelches over to a patch of sedge, but pauses before bending to uproot them. "Maybe we should just floor the dojo with mud."

"_No_," Don and Leo say in unison.

* * *

After dunking themselves in the semi-clean water to wash off the worst of the mud, they fold up the bedsheet and carry it home. There they use the rope Casey gave them to string it up from the catwalks, so that it acts as a giant strainer, draining the wet grass slowly into the pool.

Leo watches it drip.

"Seriously," Raph says. "Ancient Japanese art of mud-wrestling."

"I don't think so," Leo says.

"You're boring," Raph informs him.

"I know," Leo says.

* * *

"I don't know," Leonardo says, later that night, when Donatello asks him what Japan is like. "I didn't see very much of it."

"Well, what's the Ancient One's house like?" Michelangelo asks.

"It's just a house," Leonardo says. He minutely adjusts the glass of water between his hands. "Kitchen, living room, dojo, bedrooms. Electricity. Indoor plumbing. No phone."

"Come on," Michelangelo says. "There must be _something_ interesting."

Leonardo thinks. "There are windows," he says. "So many windows. The view is beautiful."

Splinter nods. He remembers. He was there, once, in his first life.

"What could you see?" Michelangelo asks.

"Mountains," Leonardo says. "A lot of mountains. And trees. From the room I slept in, I could see the tree Master Yoshi is buried under."

"That's kinda creepy," Michelangelo says.

Splinter only notices the way Leonardo says _the room I slept in_. Not _my room_.

_Not home._

"Why?" Leonardo says.

"It just is," Michelangelo says.

Leonardo shrugs and lifts his hand from the table. Then he frowns. "Didn't I have a glass of water, a minute ago?"

They all look around.

There's a wet ring on the table.

But no glass.

* * *

Don stays up for a while, sitting in his workspace and tinkering with things.

Around two in the morning, Leo comes and stands by the end of the wall.

He doesn't say anything, so Don doesn't either.

"It's late," Leo says eventually.

"I know," Don replies, not taking his eyes from the wires and transistors on his desk.

"You should go to bed."

"I will." Completely true, as long as he doesn't specify _when_.

Don feels Leo shift his weight, but still he doesn't look up.

"Good night," Leo says pointedly.

"Good night."

Leo paces away.

After a while, Don does go to bed.

He folds himself between purple sheets, and sleeps until morning comes.

* * *

Mike can't concentrate during practice. He swears the ovals on the shadow-wall are moving, bouncing every time their three-dimensional counterpart jumps and going narrow whenever their living twin dodges.

He takes a lot of hits in his sparring matches.

Good thing they're still not using weapons.

"Michelangelo!" Splinter admonishes him, after Mike fails to avoid Don's obvious knee-breaker. "Where is your focus?"

"Is anybody else seeing this?" Mike asks, pointing to the four shadows.

Don doesn't look, because nobody has said _hold_. But Leo and Raph and Splinter do.

"Seeing what?" Leo asks.

Mike jumps up and down.

The shadows don't move.

"Never mind," he mutters.

* * *

He should really make Raph do this.

It's not a question of finding a water pipe. In this place, he'd have to make a careful survey to open up the wall and _not_ find a water pipe.

He's just tired of putting together tiny gadgets. He wants to work on something bigger. He wants to make something with a function everyone can recognize and appreciate.

A toilet fits that description perfectly.

Anyway, he enjoys a little plumbing in the morning.

* * *

"Donnie," Raph says, standing in the doorway of what will very soon be a working bathroom. "We gotta problem."

"What?" Don asks.

"They're back," Raph says.

* * *

The room that might eventually become a dojo is filled with mushrooms again.

"Do you feel like this place is deliberately trying to thwart us?" Don asks.

"Kinda seems that way," Raph says.

* * *

Leo doesn't really understand how radios work, but he's under the impression that their functioning is not improved by being a hundred feet underground.

At any rate, they have one now and it's working and it makes the time go faster.

He's taking a few minutes to crank the generator while Mike continues sorting out the things they brought home two nights ago.

"Did you say something?" Mike asks.

"No," Leo says.

"You didn't just ask me why I keep leaving all the lights on?"

"It must have been the radio," Leo says.

Although it seems like an improbable line for a song.

* * *

Despite the interruption, Don manages to get the toilet working by lunchtime. After the prandial break, he exposes another pipe and fashions a small piece of the water tank into a kind of postmodern sink basin.

He steps back, surveys his bathroom, and finds it unsatisfying.

He dives in again.

By the end of the afternoon, the half-bath has become a full-bath. There's a functional, if Spartan, shower.

"It needs a curtain," he muses aloud.

"Uh, yeah," Mike says. Don turns to see his younger brother in the doorway. "Dinner's ready."

Don sweeps his arm around the small space. "Behold. My greatest creation."

Mike looks doubtfully at the new fittings. "I dunno, Donnie. I liked some of your other stuff better."

Don just shakes his head. Some people had no taste.

* * *

They get ready to go out.

Raph pats his belt, making sure he has all his gear.

"Where's my phone?" he says.

Don puts his head in his hands.

"Where did you put it?" Leo asks, his tone infuriatingly calm.

"I didn't put it anywhere!" Raph insists.

They search.

* * *

Mike watches Klunk growl at the lockers.

He starts opening the little metal doors.

Raph's phone is behind the last one.

* * *

"How the hell did it get there?" Raph demands, snatching the phone and jamming it into his belt.

"I'm just telling you where I found it," Mike says.

"Whatever," Raph says, before anyone can give him a lecture about keeping better track of his stuff. "Let's get outta here."

* * *

They come home with, among other things, an absolutely hideous shower curtain. It is a previously-unknown shade of pink. Mercifully, some of the pink is obscured by images of small, rounded creatures which are probably meant to be cute. Don doesn't really see the appeal, but he hangs the curtain in the new bathroom with great pride.

Later, Leo tells them about the time he stood on one foot all day, holding up buckets of water and trying to interpret Zen parables to the Ancient One's satisfaction.

"So?" Mike asks. "What _is_ the one with the strawberries about?"

They all fall silent. Their eyes slide to where the fruit basket had been.

"Life is short," Leo says. "Eat the strawberries."


	8. Eight

Eight

_There are things that no one says. _

_There's an unspoken rule that there are things they just don't talk about to Outsiders. Like their bouts with shell-rot. Or the way full-spectrum light turns their higher brain functions to mush. _

_Or the way they co-slept until they were almost ten years old, and still slide into each other's beds without a second thought. At some point, they learned that many humans think this is Strange, or even Wrong. _

_So they just don't talk about it. _

_There's an unspoken rule that the younger brother always goes to the bed of the older brother. This means that Don and Raph can both visit and receive, while Mike always has to seek out nighttime company, and Leo always has to wait for someone to come to him. _

_But it seems to work out. _

_So no one says anything._

* * *

Mike is surprised to feel someone sitting on the edge of his bed.

"What?" he mumbles.

"... chel ... chel ..."

He pries his eyes open, but no one is there. Klunk is by his shoulder, glaring into the darkness, all her fur standing on end.

"... chela ..."

He scrambles out of bed and runs for the door.

* * *

Lying in the hammock, Raph's arm draped protectively over him, he thinks about footsteps and voices and shadows that move on their own.

Something isn't right.

* * *

"Hey." Raph yawns and rubs at his eyes. "When'd you get here?"

"While ago," Mike says.

"Nightmare?"

"Something like that."

* * *

Don is impressed by Raph's nearly heroic level of self-control in coming directly to training, without making a detour to look in the cistern room.

He's less impressed by Raph's performance in navigating blindfolded through a chalk maze.

"No, Raph," Don says. "You just walked through the wall and fell into the alligator pit."

"Your directions suck," Raph says, taking two steps backwards.

"I seem to recall my first direction was _walk slowly and listen to my directions_," Don says testily.

"Guys," Leo says. "I can't hear."

"Right," Mike tells him. "I mean, your left. Well, now it's behind you."

Leo stops. "Am I even still on the course?"

"Um..." Mike looks at Master Splinter. "Can we start over?"

Splinter sighs. "Leonardo, you are outside the maze. Raphael, you have been eaten by alligators. All of you begin again."

Looking at the complexity and artistry of the mazes, Don wonders how long Splinter has already been awake.

* * *

It probably says something about his life, that he's not even surprised by the magical reappearance of a crapload of mushrooms.

Not surprised, no. More like angry. And disappointed, that he can't deliver on his promise.

He figures that three tries constitutes a reasonable effort. It's time to ask for help.

* * *

In the end, the concept of 'help' doesn't enter into it, and Leo wonders when Raph got so good at giving orders.

"Knew I was going to get stuck doing that," Mike says bitterly.

Leo can't blame him for being disappointed. With Raph promising to clear out the cistern room on his own, and everything else finally clean, he'd thought he wouldn't have to look at any more mushrooms for a while. Don had been making vague noises about sending Leo and Mike to scout the waterway, and it sounded downright fun compared to what Leo had been doing for most of the past month.

"Let's all pitch in and finish the cleaning," Leo says. "Then it'll be done."

Raph gives him a funny look that he can't quite read.

* * *

Everything smells like lemon. It's on the walls and on his skin and in his blankets. It's not like he's seen a lot of lemons before, but if he continues not seeing them for the rest of his life, that would be just fine.

And then everything smells like something else.

Mike lowers the bottle of disinfectant and sniffs again.

"Does anyone smell that?" he asks.

"Smell what?" Leo asks.

"I don't smell anything," says Raph.

"I don't think I'll ever smell anything again," says Don.

He sniffs.

It's gone.

Only lemon.

* * *

He is so proud of his sons.

They are learning to be a family again.

He has seen Leonardo begin to open up to his brothers, to listen to them and to answer their questions.

He has watched Donatello and Michelangelo respond to that, inviting Leonardo back into family activities and gently teaching him how to be what they need him to be now.

He noticed Raphael's recognition of a task he could not complete alone, and the deft way his stubbornly independent son called on his brothers to work together on the project.

And he did not miss the look Raphael gave Leonardo, the look that said _I don't need you to enforce my orders._

* * *

Donatello is still scrubbing mechanically at the wall when he feels a hand on his arm.

"Donnie?"

He blinks. "Wha-? Raph?" His eyes focus. He looks at the wall, then at his brother. "Are we done?"

Raph is looking at him with concern. "How long have you been zoning, bro?"

He tries to remember. "I don't know... probably a while..."

Raph takes the rag from his hand. "Yeah, we're done. Splinter's makin' dinner. He says we don't have to go to the junkyard if we don't wanna."

_Not_ crawling through trash sounds immensely appealing right now.

"All I really want to do," Don says, "is take a shower and then stop moving for a while."

Raph slaps him on the back. "Go to it, bro."

* * *

Leo is done eating, but he continues sitting.

He's clean. The Lair is clean. The security system is working, and there's food on the table, and there hasn't been an argument all day.

He's filled with a quiet contentment, and it's even better than the desperate happiness he felt when he found his brothers and brought them to this new home.

He doesn't ever want to leave this kitchen, this moment. He wants to stay here, with his family, forever.

And then Raph has to go and ruin it.

"I gotta bring Casey back his saw," Raph says. "Anybody wanna come?"

"I will," Mike says, and just like that the moment is shattered.

"I'll stay," Leo says. Part of him wants to go, to do whatever his brothers are doing, to not let them out of his sight, but they've been dropping decreasingly subtle hints that this is exactly what they _don't_ want him to do anymore.

"Me too," Don says.

Well. At least he doesn't have to let _all_ of them go.

* * *

"Hey," he says to Raph, and "Hey" to Mike, and then he wonders why two more giant turtles aren't climbing into his apartment.

"What?" he says. "Don 'n Leo get lost or somethin'?"

"Stayed home," Raph says, putting down the heavy case.

"This a drop-and-run, then?" Casey asks.

"Nah," Raph says, stretching his arms out. "We got _all_ night."

Casey likes the sound of that.

* * *

It's been so long since he had a night off, he doesn't know what to do with himself. He sits by the comforting hum of Don's computer, and tries to ignore the voice in his head that always wants to know where his brothers are and what they're up to.

It's a losing battle.

"What are you doing?" he asks, and hopes it comes off as friendly and not intrusive.

Don glances at him. "Talking to my friends." He hits a few more keys, then looks at Leo again and smiles. "They noticed I was gone."

* * *

It's late, there's a sliver of moon in the sky, and his brother is heading down the fire escape towards the manhole cover that will take them home.

"Raph," Mike says, taking one step up the ladder. "Let's run."

Raph glances at the roofs. "Yeah," he says. "Okay."

And they're off.

It's been way too long since they've done this. He's missed moving fast through open spaces, the wind in his bandana, leaving ghosts of footprints in places most people will never see, footprints that say _I was here_.

There's no destination and no rules. They're just running, flying, agreeing on speed and direction without needing to exchange words.

It's a warm summer night, and he knows a park with a fountain that throws up endless sparkling spray in the hot months. He angles towards it, and Raph follows him.

They stop at the edge of a roof overlooking the open quadrangle.

It's not late enough. There are still teenagers there, playing in a wading pool meant for much smaller children, splashing each other and making a tremendous amount of noise.

"Damn," Raph says. He casts a sideways glance at Mike. "Wanna scare these kids into never breaking curfew again?"

Mike isn't listening. "You smell that?" he says.

Raph sniffs, and wrinkles his brow. "What is that?"

"It's what I smelled in the Lair," Mike says, trying to remember where else he's noticed the strange odor. "I think... I think it's something in the pool..."

"Yeah," Raph says. "Think you're right."

Mike feels dizzy, all of a sudden. "I want to go home," he says.

* * *

He's pacing softly along the catwalks, heading for his room, when he hears his name called.

He peers into Leo's room. "Yeah?" Leo waves him in, and he enters fully. "What's up?"

"I wanted to ask you something," Leo says.

"Go for it," Raph says.

Leo tilts his head, looking at him oddly. "When I was away... were you in charge?"

Raph doesn't know what to make of the question. "Sorta. Why?"

"Thank you," Leo says.

Raph narrows his eyes. "For what?"

"For taking care of them."

Raph snorts. "Maybe you ain't noticed, Leo, but they pretty much take care of themselves now."

"Yeah." Leo looks away. "When did they start doing that?"

"Gosh, Leo," Raph says. "Might've even been before that whole thing with the Shredder. You really oughta pay more attention."

"Tell me about it," Leo says.

"I would," Raph says, "but you never freakin' listen."

"Raph," Leo says, facing him again. "Why wouldn't you say goodbye to me?"

Raph is caught off-guard by the sudden turn in the conversation. "What?"

"When I left," Leo says. "I told you I was going, and you just sort of grunted and walked away."

"That's not how I remember it," Raph says. Leo blinks at him. "You told me you were going to be away for a while, and there was this look on your face like you didn't expect the city to be standing when you got back, because obviously as soon as you got on that boat I was gonna go nuts and start setting buildings on fire or something. And, pardon my French, but I'd had enough of your shit and I just wanted you to _go away_."

"I'm sorry," Leo says.

"Don't start," Raph says tiredly. "I'm going to bed. Good night."

"Good night, Raph."

There's another reason, but he won't say it.

As long as Raph didn't say goodbye, Leo had to come back.


	9. Nine

Nine

_A few days into his second life, he discovers he can imitate the sounds that humans are constantly making at one another. _

_The endless stream of noise that he absorbed during his first life suddenly resolves itself into words with uses and meanings. _

_He decides to practice this new skill. _

_He talks to the four turtles, but for his own benefit, so he's astonished when they start talking back. _

_They learn words with amazing rapidity and no apparent effort. _

_It makes him wonder what else they can learn._

* * *

He's pinned between orange sheets, listening to a voice in the darkness.

It's telling him some innocuous bedtime story, and he's too terrified to move.

"Who are you?" he whispers.

The storytelling stops abruptly. "What?" says the voice.

"Leave me alone!" he whimpers.

"Wait," says the voice. "You're not -"

The weight on his mattress leaves suddenly, all at once.

He lies there, scared and frozen and Klunk crouching protectively over his chest, through the long dark hours of the night.

* * *

Splinter rises early and goes to the dojo.

The mushrooms have not come back, and he marvels at the bonds between his sons, the way that nothing can defeat them when they work as one.

He will have them consecrate the new dojo with meditation, letting their chi merge with the energy of this place.

The air still reeks of lemon. He wishes he had some incense.

He sits down and waits for his sons to rise.

* * *

Leo looks.

He looks again.

Counting himself, there are _seven_ distinct energy sources here.

The icy cloud is still there, but floating near it are two bubbles of chi, the psychic shadows of people.

These aren't like the astral images of plants and animals. They're constant, self-contained, the projections of thinking beings.

At the same time, they're not like the vibrant, colorful energy of his family. Not like the pulsing brilliance of the Ancient One. They're pale and faint and they cast no light into the void.

He hasn't yet mastered the art of speaking mind-to-mind.

So he says nothing.

But he watches.

* * *

This is strange and unsettling.

It unnerves him to see these unknown entities so close to his sons, three of them oblivious, the fourth trying desperately to protect them from a perceived danger, a danger he knows he can't fight, a danger he knows they can't even see.

These echoes are so faded, and yet still so clear...

He sinks out of the meditative trance.

"My sons," he says softly. "Come back."

They return, blinking, to the physical plane. They stretch, stand up, bow, walk out.

Except Michelangelo.

He doesn't move.

* * *

He's woken by someone saying his name.

"... chel ... chelan ... Michelangelo!"

His eyes fly open and he's looking into the face of his father.

"Michelangelo," Splinter says. "We must talk."

Mike glances around. His brothers are already gone.

"Sorry, Sensei," he says.

Splinter settles into a more comfortable sitting position. "What is troubling you?" he asks.

Mike shifts uneasily. "There's something weird about this place," he says. "Nothing does what it's supposed to. Everything is..." He hunches his shoulders and lowers his voice. "It's like we're not alone here..."

"Have I ever told you about the home of my Master Yoshi?" Splinter says.

"What?" Mike blinks, confused by the change of subject. "Sure, lots of times."

"I do not think I have told you this," Splinter says distantly. For a moment he stares at nothing. Then he continues. "I am speaking of the home of the Ancient One, where he raised Yoshi and Mashimi and Tang Shen, before he went to the mountain."

"Okay," Mike says uncertainly.

"From my cage," Splinter says, "I could see many things. I would watch my family inside, and the trees outside, and the things along the edge."

"Along the edge of what?" Mike asks.

"Along the edge of the room," Splinter says. "I watched the creatures that stalked in the corners."

Mike furrows his brow. "You mean other rats?"

Splinter shakes his head. "They were not rats. They were other creatures, dark creatures, that never came into the center of the room. They were strange to me, and frightening."

Mike desperately tries to figure out where this is going. "I don't understand," he says.

"Nor did I," Splinter says, "until many years later. Looking back, I understood what these creatures were." He fingers his walking stick. "Like many traditional houses in Japan, the home of my Master Yoshi had paper walls." He waits, but Mike only shakes his head. "There were no black creatures skulking in the corners," Splinter explains gently. "I was only seeing the shadows of familiar people in other rooms." He tilts his head. "What do you learn from this, my son?"

Mike doesn't feel like he's learned anything. "That paper walls don't give a lot of privacy?"

Splinter sighs. "And what else?"

Mike looks at the floor. "Not to jump to conclusions?" he guesses. "That everything has a rational explanation?"

"Yes, my son," Splinter says. "Do not let your imagination get the best of you."

"But Sensei," Mike looks up. "The shadows were _moving_. And our walls aren't paper."

* * *

He can't see the energy, now that his eyes are open.

But that doesn't mean it isn't still there.

"What's with you?" Raph asks, pushing past him.

Leo realizes he's drifted to a halt in the middle of the kitchen, and shifts out of the way. "What?"

"You look like you're expectin' a buncha Foot to jump outta the fridge," Raph says.

"I'm..." He slowly pulls out a chair and sits in it. "I'm wondering whether this place is safe enough. Maybe -"

"Don't even say it," Don says, sitting next to him.

"I'm not talking about you." Leo catches the bowl of cereal Raph slides to him. "I'm talking about me."

"Leo." Don stirs the dry flakes. "Stop."

They eat, silent except for the crunching.

Mike and Splinter come in, fill their bowls, sit at the table.

"Mike," Don says. "Will you check out the access tunnel for me?"

"Sure," Mike says absently.

They eat.

* * *

Donatello and Michelangelo and Raphael disperse to begin the work of the day.

"Sensei," Leonardo starts.

"I know," Splinter says. "Do not worry about it."

Any of his other sons would argue.

But Leonardo, the dutiful eldest, does not.

* * *

Leo paces slowly into the main room.

Raph is kneeling by the generator, turning the crank to build up energy for the day. "Hey, Leo," he says, jerking his head toward the bedsheet where the sedge has been drying. "Ya wanna help me get that down?"

Wordlessly, Leo climbs the stairs to the catwalks, and begins untying the knots holding up the sheet.

A minute later Raph is opposite him, letting down the other side. Between them, they set the sheet swinging and toss it to land lightly on the floor below. Don and Mike drag it further from the pool, and spread out the corners, before heading off to start their own work. Splinter comes out of the kitchen, settles himself beside the sheet, and begins the work of peeling off the grass's outer layers, revealing the soft, pliable core within.

Raph vaults the railing.

Leo takes the stairs.

* * *

For some reason, Don has the distinct feeling that his brothers would like it a lot if he built something with wheels.

Well, too bad. All the engine parts he's managed to acquire are busy making the electricity work.

Anyway, he should whip up some of his patented Turtle Trackers.

Especially with the way things have been disappearing lately.

* * *

Mike dives.

The water is cool and silent and familiar. He swims down, instinctive motion. Not too far along, the tunnel is blocked by a grating.

He's looking for a way to open or remove it when his lungs leap jarringly, as if they're reaching for air that will never be there again.

He kicks backwards in a panic, and races a stream of bubbles to the surface.

* * *

He's lying half-sprawled on the floor, coughing and trying to breathe, his legs still dangling into the cool wet dark.

"Mikey!" Don is hovering over him, wiping the water from his snout. "What happened?"

"Don't know," Mike pants. "Thought I was drowning."

And Leo is there, putting a hand on his shell, offering him a towel. "Are you okay?"

"I can't stay here," Mike says, dragging himself forward and rising shakily to his knees. "I gotta get out."

* * *

Leo comes with him.

They sit under a sidewalk grate, the calming sunlight falling on their shoulders.

Quietly, so the humans won't look down, Mike repeats Splinter's story.

Leo understands. This is about mountains and molehills, about not letting obstacles fill your vision until you can't see any way around them. This is about how the yawning chasm he saw between himself and his brothers was really no wider than the space between two buildings, the distance they all leap without fear or hesitation.

"I think it's about not letting fear cloud your judgment," Mike says.

"I think you're right," Leo says.

"Okay," Mike says. "I'm ready to go back."

* * *

Raphael watches his brothers go. Then he sits on the floor by his father and starts stripping down sedge.

Splinter's narrow fingers skillfully weave the blades, the ancient pattern of tatami. "Did you enjoy your evening?" he asks.

"Yeah," Raph says.

"Did you fight?" Splinter asks, and there is no judgment in his voice.

"No, Sensei," Raph says. "We didn't look for trouble, and we didn't find any." His eyes slide to the wet patch by the pool. "Mike has some kinda luck with those access tunnels, huh?"

"So it seems," Splinter says.

"He's been a little funny lately," Raph ventures.

Splinter doesn't rise to the verbal feint.

"Y'know," Raph goes on, conversationally. "Seeing things. Hearing things. _Smelling_ things. Kinda weird, don'cha think?"

"If you are seeking answers about Michelangelo," Splinter says, "then you are speaking to the wrong person."

Damn.

* * *

Leo runs his hand over the artfully, artificially dirt-encrusted wall, and presses the button that opens the door.

Mike shuffles in, goes directly to where Raph and Splinter are sitting, and settles himself as close to their father as possible without actually sitting on his lap or his work.

Leo glances over at Don's work area, then heads for the remains of the salvage pile, the bulky things that didn't fit into the lockers. He throws a roll of ugly, 70's-vintage upholstery over his shoulder, fills his arms with miscellaneous pieces of wood, and returns to the circle.

"Do you want to make the sandbag?" he asks, kneeling to lower his load to the floor.

Mike shrugs.

Leo goes to the kitchen, takes the antique sewing kit from the drawer, goes back, offers it to Mike. He goes to his room to get his whittling knife, the one he used to occupy himself during the long evening hours at the Ancient One's home, the one he used to make gifts for his brothers. He returns to the main room, sits, and sets to work carving the wood into a training post.

Raph is eying the garish upholstery. "Know what I think?" he says.

"What do you think?" Leo asks, whittling down the end of a broken chair leg.

"I think we really oughta get a couch," Raph says.

Leo looks over his shoulder at the empty room. A couch _would_ go a long way towards filling it. A couch and a TV.

"We need padding for under the mats," he says.

"Raid the stables?" Raph asks.

Leo nods, picks up a slice of tree trunk, starts making a hole for his peg.

"Cool," Raph says. "I could use a good stealth mission."

Leo wonders which of them will lead it.

* * *

Don squints at the tiny chip.

Somewhere beyond the screen, the rest of his family is sitting together, doing simple manual labor and talking about ordinary things.

And here he is, alone in the corner, doing complicated technical work and periodically refreshing his inbox to see whether anybody on the listserv has come up with a worthwhile critique of his theory.

This is what passes for normal. This is what he's come to call home.

And he's damned if he'll let Leo make them move again.

He'll chain himself to the railing if he has to. He's put too much effort into this place to leave it now.

Reload.

New message.

Spam.

_Delete._

If only all problems could be solved so easily.

* * *

"11th and 52nd," Raph says at dinner.

"It's a park," Don replies. Then he looks around. "Is this a new game?"

Leo spins his finger to hold his conversational place while he finishes chewing. "No. This is tonight's mission."

"Okay," Don says. "Obviously I've missed something."

"Short version," Raph says, "Stables, hay bales, dojo floor."

"Got it," Don says.

Raph claps him on the shoulder. "Always were a fast learner."

* * *

Mike says nothing at dinner, and then disappears up to his room. Raph clears his plate hastily and follows him.

"Hey," he says, nudging open the door and sliding in. "You okay?"

Mike doesn't _look_ okay. He's curled up on his blankets. But he says, "Yeah."

"You coming tonight?"

"I'm not staying here," Mike says.

"You don't like this place," Raph says flatly.

Mike shrugs.

"You think we should move?" Raph asks, trying to make it sound neutral.

Instead of answering, Mike tells him some weird story about translucent walls. "What do you think it means?" he concludes.

"How the hell should I know?" Raph says.

* * *

Leo lifts the manhole cover, peers up and down the street, then surges up and whips inside the building. He takes stock of the situation as his brothers catch up.

No people. Some of the horses are awake, but watching them sleepily, without concern.

He moves to the ladder and puts his hand on it.

"Wait," Raph says. "You stay here and catch." He points to Mike. "You're lookout." He tags Don's arm as he moves forward. "With me."

Leo shifts automatically out of the way as his brothers go past, and then he stands there, thinking alternately that Raph is a massively unskilled leader, and that he himself has just been personally insulted.

For starters, he can't fathom why Raph would assign Mike as lookout. Mike has always been the _worst_ lookout. He's too distractible, equally likely to miss danger or jump at nothing.

And why did _he_, Leo, get the most menial task?

His ruminations are interrupted by a hay bale coming down the hatch at high speed. He catches it on reflex, puts it safely out of the way, and comes back for the next.

The operation goes quickly. Raph and Don throw down only eight bales before dropping from the loft. That's the most they can carry easily. Also, these are property; they belong to someone; and when they have to steal they prefer to take a little from several people rather than a lot from one person.

Raph whistles out a birdcall, summoning Mike back from wherever he's posted himself. They pick up the hay bales, glance around to make sure they haven't left any obvious tracks, and head back underground.

Leo has to admit to himself that he can't find any fault with his brothers' performance on the mission.

But he doesn't understand why they're putting him on the outskirts.

* * *

Mike's not really in a hurry to get home, but the hay bales are scratchy and it's a relief to put them down. He feels across the wall, fingers searching the general area where he knows the release button to be.

He can't find it.

He leans down and squints, looking for the dirt glob that's really an unlocking mechanism.

"What's the problem?" Don asks.

"Can't find the button," Mike says.

"Here." Don puts down his load and leans over Mike's shoulder, reaching to poke at the stained bricks. "Huh."

"Huh what?" Raph demands.

Don straightens up and glances around the tunnel. "This _is_ the place..."

"Is it broken?" Leo asks. "Are we locked out?"

"It's not broken," Don says. "It's just not - exactly... present."

"What do you mean, it's not _present_?" Leo too puts down his hay bales and goes to look. "It was there this morning."

Don is dialing his shell-cell. He listens to it ring. "Master Splinter, we can't - No, we're okay, we just can't seem to open the door. Can you -"

The door swings open. Master Splinter is there, holding his phone and his walking stick like weapons.

"Worst infiltration ever," Raph says, hefting his bales and carrying them inside.

* * *

Raph and Mike go out again, with the sandbag, to fill it with dirt from the baseball field.

Don, resigned to not receiving any interesting e-mails today, sits with his legs dangling off the catwalk, leafing through a thin Bierce volume.

Leo comes and leans against the railing next to him, looking out across the Lair. "I haven't seen you much today," he says.

Don flips a few pages. "Is this a comment about you, or a comment about me?"

"Just a comment," Leo says.

Don turns another page, discovers that the end of a story is missing.

"Raph told me he was in charge while I was gone," Leo says.

Don closes the book and carefully puts it down. "Do you think I should have been?"

"I didn't say that." Leo straightens up, bracing his arms against the rail, elbows locked.

"Then what are you asking?" Don says, tipping his head back to look at his brother.

Leo shifts his feet slightly, squaring his stance. "Is he a good leader?"

"That's an unfair question, Leo."

"I didn't ask if he's _better_. I just asked if he's _good_."

"And if I say yes," Don says, "you'll take that to _mean_ that he's better." He leans back and swings his feet. "But if I say no, then you'll probably turn into a complete control freak again."

Leo sits down, but keeps one hand on the rail. "I don't understand his decisions tonight," he says. "I don't know why..."

"Why you got stuck doing nothing?" Don suggests. He draws his legs up and crosses them. "Leo... I may be way off the mark, and I don't necessarily endorse this opinion, but I think Raph wanted you to know that we can pull off missions without your help. Not that we don't _like_ your help," he adds, when Leo visibly deflates. "Just that... you don't have to be responsible for us all the time. We won't self-destruct if you take a day off."

Leo's fingers tighten on the metal. "I don't know what you want me to do."

"_I_ don't know what I want you to do," Don says. "Why is this even my decision? It's your life, Leo. I can't tell you how to live it."

"I understand," Leo says. He gets up. "I'm going to bed."

"Leo -" Don starts, trying to head off whatever ridiculous conclusion his brother has just jumped to.

"Good night, Donnie."

Don thumps his head against the metal support.

* * *

Raph sits on the rocks below the castle, watching Mike kick around in the knee-deep water.

"Okay," he says, just loud enough for his voice to carry over the pond. "So this thing about Yoshi's house."

Mike splashes closer and stands, listening.

Raph looks up at the moon, a fraction bigger than it was the night before. "I'm thinkin' it's about, y'know, learning stuff as you get older."

Mike stirs the water around with his foot. "I don't know. I think Sensei wanted me to learn something _now_."

"Well, maybe he was tryin' to say that you could learn more stuff by askin' questions." He shifts. "Though I guess _he_ couldn't ask any questions..." He tilts his head. "Anyway, what'd you do to get a Splinter-story?"

"Nothing," Mike says, turning his back.

"Is it because you've been so distracted?" Raph asks.

"I don't want to talk about it," Mike says.

"Suit yourself." Raph jumps down from the rocks, slogs across to the opposite bank, and shoulders the sandbag. "You coming in?"

"In a minute," Mike says.

Raph crouches, flips up the manhole cover, and drops into a different kind of darkness.

* * *

After a while, Mike goes home.

He gets a towel and dries his feet.

He looks down into the pool.

Then he goes to bed.

* * *

Notes

_Mike has some kinda luck with those access tunnels, huh?_ – Mike also had a bad experience with the waterway in the second Lair. See episode 2.12, "What a Croc".


	10. Ten

Ten

_When they were young, before they knew anything different, they thought they were normal. _

_When they were older, and learned that the dominant species of the world was markedly different from them, at least in appearance, they thought they were hideous. Freaks. An accident, doomed never to be wanted or loved. _

_Now, they hold a precariously-balanced dual opinion of themselves. They're proud of what they are, but they know that few humans will ever accept them. _

_It's like the double nature of life as a ninja. On the one hand, there's the wonderful freedom granted by honed athleticism. But on the other hand, there's the terrible imprisonment of always having to remain in the shadows. _

_All of these skills keep them safe, lessen their fear as they move around the margins of a world not made for them. _

_Still, encounters are inevitable. _

_Meeting a human is always a harrowing experience. Now, though, they understand that it's even worse for the human. Meeting a known danger is one thing. Being confronted with something you didn't even know existed is another thing entirely. _

_They debate, sometimes, how they can best avoid causing humans to panic. What they can say that will keep a person calm. _

_Whether it's better not to speak at all. _

_The debates always go unresolved. They just don't know enough about how humans think._

* * *

"... chel ... chela ..."

Mike wakes up.

"... ichol ..."

He realizes it isn't _his_ name the voice is saying.

"Nicholas..."

"You're not real," he says. "There's a rational explanation."

He feels a touch on his head. "Wake up, Nicky."

"I'm awake!" he cries, flailing at the air. "I'm awake..."

The weight on the bed shifts back. "You're not Nick..." Hands on his shoulders, then his neck. "Who are you? What are you doing to my son?"

"Nothing!" Mike tries to break the invisible hold. "Leave me alone!"

"Get out!" the voice shouts.

He passes into unconsciousness.

* * *

Mike fights to win.

He goes low, sweeps Raph's feet from under him, then pounces, bringing all his weight into a crushing blow aimed at Raph's head.

He deflects at the last instant.

"Yield!" Raph shouts.

They roll to their feet.

Raph sketches the required bow, then wipes his wrist across his forehead. "What the hell, Mike?"

Mike glares at them all. "You guys can believe me or not," he says, "but this place is freakin' haunted. Some invisible guy tried to strangle me last night." He moves to the edge of the practice area. "I'm not messing around."

They stare at him.

"Dismissed," Splinter says, though they've barely been practicing for half an hour. "Michelangelo..."

Mike stays behind after his brothers have left.

Splinter is silent for a moment. Then he says, "Do you truly believe this place is haunted?"

Mike lowers his head. "I thought about what you told me," he says. "But I can't come up with a better explanation. I mean..." He begins enumerating on his fingers. "Things die and decay faster than they should. Things disappear. I heard footsteps. I heard _voices_. Someone's been talking to me at night..." He glances at the doorway and makes a noise of frustration. "They won't believe me, will they?"

Splinter smiles wryly and puts a hand on Michelangelo's shoulder. "My son... do not jump to conclusions."

* * *

Mike doesn't say anything, when he goes in to breakfast, but he challenges them with his eyes.

"I believe you," Leo says.

"Don't patronize me," Mike says.

"No," Leo says. "Really. I -" He rubs his snout, thinking how to explain. "I see energy, now, when I meditate. And -" He glances at Master Splinter. "There's _something_ here."

Mike looks at Splinter. "Why didn't you say anything?"

"You are thinking that this energy is unusual and noteworthy," Splinter says. "That is not true. I saw it, but I did not think it any more worth mentioning than many other things in our home." His eyes flicker to each of them. "It seems I was mistaken."

"I don't believe a word of it," Don says. "Get a grip, guys. You can't shout _supernatural_ every time you lose something or see a funny light." He clears his place. "I have work to do."

"Guess we know where _he_ stands," Raph says, after Don has left.

"You don't believe me either," Mike says.

"I dunno yet," Raph says. "Convince me."

* * *

Don sits in his alcove, fitting parts together, making a receiver for his Trackers.

This is all clearly nonsense. No matter how many times Splinter lectures him on opening his third eye, he does not believe in spooks.

He believes that meditation promotes physical health and increases mental discipline. He does not believe that it grants psychic powers.

That answers Leo and Splinter's assertions. As for Mike... well, he always has been afraid of the dark.

Maybe he'll sleep in Mike's room tonight.

Just to prove there's nothing there.

* * *

The skin on their hands is thick and calloused, but the straw still slices stinging marks into their palms.

Leo shuffles the hay around with his feet, trying to get it to spread evenly.

"So," Mike says, breaking the tie on another bale. "Is there anything else really important you haven't told us yet?"

Leo pauses in his work. "I told Master Splinter, and he said pretty much the same thing he said this morning."

"Oh," Mike says. "Well, that makes it okay."

Leo looks hard at him, trying to read this strange, surly Michelangelo. "Do you really want me to tell you every probably-insignificant detail of my life?"

Mike stretches the tie between his hands, pulling until it breaks again, then throwing the pieces to the floor. "I don't know," he says. "I don't know anything anymore."

"What do you want to do?" Leo asks.

"I don't know!" Mike shouts, pacing to the far side of the room. "I thought you were going away to get your head together, to be the leader again. I thought you were going to come back and, y'know, _lead_! You tell me what to do!"

Leo crosses to where Mike had been standing, drops to one knee, and picks up the broken pieces of plastic ribbon. "I don't know what you guys want from me," he says softly. "You tell me you have everything under control, you tell me to give you more space, then you tell me to make decisions for you… I'm trying to listen but it doesn't make any sense! I want to fix things but I can't!"

"Then who's going to?" Mike shouts. He slams his fist against the wall. "I can't live like this, Leo..."

"You shouldn't have to." Leo rises, goes to his brother, puts a hand on his shoulder. "We'll fix it. Together. I promise."

* * *

He passes the receiver over the Trackers, and the numbers spin wildly.

He's triple-checked everything. These readings just don't make sense.

He scoops up the Trackers, goes outside the screen, and casts the little devices across the Lair like a handful of dice.

Raph looks up from cranking the generator. "Those better not be explosives."

Don doesn't answer. He serpentines across the room, pacing slowly and watching the receiver's display intently.

There it goes again. The numbers indicating distance to the target decrease in an orderly fashion, until he gets within grabbing distance. Then the counter suddenly shoots up to 1000.

Why 1000?

He bends and collects the Trackers, picking them up like loose change.

Back to the drawing board.

* * *

Leo works on the training post, trying to get the wheels to fit together so they will spin easily without flying off the base.

Next to him, Splinter is weaving, Mike is edging the mats so they won't unravel, and Raph is reinforcing the top of the sandbag so the weight of it against the chain won't rip it apart.

Don comes out of his alcove, seizes Leo's wrist, and presses small things into his palm. "Hide these," he instructs.

"Hide them where?" Leo asks.

"The general idea," Don says, "is that I don't _know_ where."

Leo blinks, nods, and disappears.

* * *

Don stalks around the Lair, waving the receiver like a dowsing rod.

Even though he swapped out the computer chip for one cannibalized from a completely different console, he's still getting the same problem. 30, 20, 10 ... 1000.

He supposes it works, after a fashion.

It's just damned annoying.

* * *

Mike jumps down from Raph's shoulders and gives the newly-hung bag an experimental kick.

"Hey," Raph complains. "I got dibs."

Mike backs off and lets Raph christen the bag with a few punches.

"So," Raph says, executing a jump kick. "What happened in the access tunnel?"

"Nothing," Mike says. "There was nothing there."

Raph catches the bag on the backswing and stills it. "You really keep getting attacked by invisible stuff?"

Mike stares steadily at his brother's back. "Yeah."

Raph turns around and matches the gaze. "Ghosts are trying to kill you."

"You still don't believe me," Mike says.

"Yes or no, Mike?" Raph says.

"Yes."

"Okay," Raph says. "I believe you." He turns and takes another whack at the bag, then leaves it swinging and goes to the doorway. He seems to feel that more explanation is required, so he pauses and says, "You're a nutball, but you're not a liar and you're not completely deluded. If you believe it, I believe it."

Then he goes out.

Mike takes a deep breath.

Only one left.

* * *

Mike thinks about how to convince Don, and watches the bag swing.

Its arc never seems to diminish.

Don may be intellectually obstinate, always putting the burden of proof on the opposing theory, but sandbags that defy the laws of physics certainly ought to count as evidence of ghosts.

Mike knows that, as soon as he turns his back, the bag will stop swinging.

He sidles to the door and sticks his head out, keeping his eyes turned into the room. "Donnie?"

"Busy," Don calls back.

"You really gotta see this -"

"_Busy_," Don calls again, more emphatically.

Mike sighs. He watches the bag a while longer. Then he goes to see what else he can help with.

There's an awful lot of creepy stuff happening around here. Sooner or later, Don will _have_ to see some of it.

* * *

It turns out to be 'sooner', and it happens like this.

The lights go off.

"_What?_" Don shouts. "What am I missing?" They hear him turning the crank furiously, then pounding on the generator. "Work!"

The lights go on.

Don is standing there with a crazed expression on his face.

"Dude," Mike says. "You're getting scary."

"I have not yet begun to get scary," Don says darkly, and dives into the guts of the machine.

* * *

Don extracts himself from the generator, and points at it menacingly. "Don't you _dare_ -"

The lights go off.

"For the love of -!"

Don and the generator engage in a loud and violent struggle.

The lights go on.

Don is standing there with a loose wire in his hand.

"Um," says Raph. "Where are we drawing power from, right now?"

"We're not," says Don.

They all look around, very slowly.

"Still think I'm crazy?" Mike says.

"Still don't believe in ghosts," Don says. "But beginning to wonder _why_ this place was abandoned."

* * *

In short order, Don has brought back his computer from sleep mode, accessed the archives of the New York Times, and run a search for articles related to municipal wastewater treatment facilities. He clicks rapidly through several before finding one that seems relevant.

"Here," he says, and begins reading. "'The Central Park water treatment plant is slated to be closed in the wake of a gas leak accident. The plant, scheduled for renovation to bring it up to date with current regulations, will instead be decommissioned and replaced with a new facility.

"'The accident, which occurred late last night, resulted in the deaths of two employees. A faulty pump allowed chlorine, commonly used in water purification systems, to escape from its tank. This gas has a noticeable odor, but is harmless at low concentrations...'

"Guys," he says. "People _died_ here."

Splinter looks thoughtful, Mike looks shocky, Leo looks like he wants to attack something, and Raph keeps shifting between confusion, anger, and something else that Don can't quite figure out.

"That's freakin' creepy," Raph says.

"This is my fault," Leo says. "I should have -"

"Don't start that again," Don says, turning back to the screen and scanning through the rest of the article.

Mike comes and reads over his shoulder. "Chlorine..." he says slowly. "Is that the stuff they use in swimming pools?"

"Often," Don says distractedly.

"That's what I smelled in the dojo," Mike says.

Don stops scrolling. "That's impossible," he says. "All the tanks are empty now, and..." He flicks to the top of the page. "This was fourteen years ago."

"I smelled it," Mike says.

"And I sensed two presences," Splinter offers.

"It all makes a messed-up kinda sense," Raph says.

Don sits back in his chair, his hand resting on the mouse. "Fine," he says. He looks up at Mike. "You say the ghosts talk to you? Then I think it's time to talk back."

* * *

They form a huddle on the floor, sitting near the generator as though it's a campfire, even though right now it isn't generating heat or light or, apparently, anything.

Mike is stroking Klunk, largely for his own comfort, and keeps glancing nervously over his shoulder.

"'Course," Raph says, "now that we _want_ creepy shit to happen, nothing will."

"Right," Don says dryly. "Because the ghosts can read our minds."

They lapse into silence.

"How long're we gonna wait?" Raph asks.

"For as long as we must," Splinter says.

"We're just gonna sit here all night?" Raph says.

Leo stands up. "Let's bring down the mattresses," he says. "We can camp out."

* * *

They drag out the four mattresses and push three of them together. Mike claims a spot in the middle, builds a nest of orange blankets, and buries himself in it.

Raph sits next to him. "You're not goin' to bed already?"

"Not really," Mike mumbles.

Raph contemplates the shadow-wall. "What do you think they want?"

"The ghosts?"

"Mm."

Mike thinks about it. "Not to be dead?"

"Can't give 'em that," Raph says. "What do they say to you, at night?"

"Only one," Mike says. "Only one of them talks to me. He thought I was…" _Someone else._ "He thought I was hurting his son." He stretches his toes against the still-stiff fabric. "Maybe they just want to be safe..."

"So... your something-like-a-nightmare...?"

"Yeah," Mike says.

* * *

Splinter makes dinner, and they have a subdued picnic on the mattresses.

Leo eats quickly, silently, and goes to the kitchen to start the dishes.

By the side of the sink is the glass from four days ago.

He sets his plate down and picks up the glass, turning it in his hand, looking for answers in its transparent curves.

He doesn't find any.

He washes it and puts it away.

* * *

Mike contemplates the narrow edge of the plywood wall.

On the side of it designated as 'behind', Don sits in his kidnapped kitchen chair, one hand wrapped around his forehead. The fingers of his other hand are twitching intermittently, and his lips are moving soundlessly.

"What, Mike?" he says after a moment.

Mike reaches out to touch the thin partition. "What's with this wall?"

Don sighs. "Yes, I know my love of privacy is offensive to you. Did you want something? This is usually the part where you drag me off to watch a movie, but we don't have a TV, so..."

Without further preamble, Mike sits on the edge of the desk and repeats, one more time, Splinter's story.

"If you want to know what I'm doing back here," Don says, "you can just ask."

"Okay," Mike says. "What are you doing?"

"Right now?" Don gestures to his computer screen, which is displaying an eclectic mix of information about water-purification technology and phenomena commonly associated with ghosts. "Trying to figure out what happened here, and what's happening here now."

"When are you going to come out?"

"When I'm done."

"You're _never_ done."

"I didn't say you have to leave."

Mike takes that as an invitation, and sits, swinging his feet, while Don reads and thinks and talks to himself.

"Okay," Don says. He presses the little button that turns the monitor dark. "I'm done."

* * *

Raph proposes a debate over the relative merits of bedmates with cold feet versus bedmates who snore, but no one is really in the mood.

They sort out sleeping arrangements with a minimum of discussion, and settle down one against the other, their blankets making a strange test-pattern rainbow on the gray floor.

"So," Mike says. "How do we make the lights turn off?"

Don contemplates the ceiling. Then, in a loud, clear voice, he says, "Turn off the lights!"

The lights go out.


	11. Eleven

Eleven

_Strange things happen to them. _

_It's just a fact of life. _

_Mike thinks they have some kind of karma that attracts weirdness. Don has a theory about low-frequency events tending to occur in clusters. Raph calls it Turtle Luck. _

_Leo just tries to accept it. _

_There are so many things in the world, in the multiverse, that most humans would deny the existence of. And the people who wouldn't, are called crazy. _

_Sometimes he wonders if his whole life has been one long hallucination, and he's really a human sitting catatonic in a mental hospital somewhere. _

_**Am I a man dreaming I'm a turtle...?**_

_Sometimes he wishes he were normal. But then he looks at the humans, moving like robots through the same mundane routines, never opening their eyes to the wonders of the world, and he doesn't want to be like that. _

_**Or a turtle dreaming I'm a man?**_

_Somewhere between the unusual and the unlikely, he's happy._

* * *

Something jars against the mattress, and Mike reflexively raises his arms to protect himself.

"Jesus," says a voice in the darkness. (A voice of stories, a voice of crushing hands.) "Break my neck, one of these days."

Mike can feel his brothers around him, awake and tense.

"Holy -" Raph starts, but Mike shushes him.

"Hello?" Mike says tentatively.

"In here, Jay," the voice calls back.

"What?" says a different voice, on the other side of the room.

"I said, I'm in here!"

"I didn't -"

Thunder-sound.

"What the -" Stumbling footsteps. "What's all this?"

"It's not yours?"

"No." The footsteps move across the room, and Mike twists to follow them, even though there's nothing to see. "What's with this place lately? My locker keeps jamming, half my instruments are on the fritz..."

"Tell me about it. We should've had renovations _years_ ago."

"I guess no one really wants clean water after all..."

The voices drift away into the kitchen.

* * *

Mike kneels on the cold floor.

"Sensei," he says. "I'm being completely serious when I say I would _really_ like to know the rational explanation for this."

"I'll second that," Don says.

"I am not sure that you would call this explanation _rational_," Splinter says. "But I believe that these presences are... imprints, if you will, of the people who worked here. They are echoes, endlessly repeating the patterns they enacted in life."

"So we just gotta live with 'em?" Raph asks, clearly unhappy with the idea.

"On the other hand," Splinter continues, ignoring the comment, "they seem to be affected by the changes we have made to this place. They are aware, in some way, of the physical plane. And so we may be able to reach them."

"How?" Leo asks. "And to what end?"

"If we address them clearly and directly," Splinter says, "then they may hear our call. And if we can help them resolve their unfinished business in this world, then they may be able to go to their rest in the next."

"Are you serious?" Mike says, even though he knows that this kind of irreverence, during a Splinter Lecture, is likely to earn him a rap on the knuckles. "Or are you quoting from _Return to the Haunted House I Accidentally Moved Into Last Summer_?"

"Have you ever wondered why these movies you watch are all so similar to one another?" Splinter asks.

"No," Mike says. "Well, okay, yeah, but only when I'm really bored and can't sleep."

"It is because they are true," Splinter says.

"That's ridiculous," Don says. "_The Ghost That Ate My Sister_ is not based on a true story."

"It is based on many true stories," Splinter says. "Fiction is rarely as interesting as fact."

Mike swears he's going to give up scary movies.

For real, this time.

* * *

"Maybe we should all go back to sleep," Leo suggests, "and then in the morning we can -"

"No way," Raph says. "I vote we do it now."

"You _always_ vote we do it now," Leo says.

"Now would be good," Mike says. "I can't sleep with these guys around. This is four nights... by morning I'll be a Scary Mutant Zombie Turtle."

Leo seems to have no further objections.

"Then let us call them," Splinter says. "Donatello, if you will?"

"If I will what?" Don says, then, "Oh." He clears his throat. "Turn on the lights!"

The lights go on.

* * *

Raph glares around the room, looking for anything out of the ordinary.

The first thing he notices is that the heap of scrap metal is in even greater disarray than the haphazard pile he left it in.

The second thing he notices is that Mike is trying to climb inside his shell with him.

"What?" he says, irritated, and Mike points.

Raph looks.

Two of the shadows on the wall are _peeling off_.

It has to be a trick of the light. He pushes Mike off, grabs his sai from the floor, and stalks over.

No.

Definitely peeling.

He can't tell whose shadows they are; all four seem to have moved and changed shape.

He reaches out, making to draw his sai across one of the lines, to see whether it will twang like a guitar string or snap like a tendon.

"Raphael," Splinter says sharply.

He retreats.

* * *

Splinter meditates with one eye open.

He knows how hard it is to be anchored in two worlds at once, to watch both the physical and the astral planes, to live one life while having memories of another.

The two shadows are hanging half off the concrete, like old wallpaper, and the two clouds of energy are floating slowly through the void.

They're near, and moving closer, but distance and direction mean little on the astral plane, where an act of will is sufficient to move one across the universe, where Leonardo's spirit can hover over them all even when his body is still miles away.

(_And maybe, just maybe, can hold back their enemies long enough for them to escape._)

He tries to forge a connection between the clouds and the shadows, to give the energy a form, if a thin one. There's nowhere else to put it.

(_Not his sons, not his sons._)

The shadows peel.

* * *

Leo watches Splinter with one eye, and the shadows with the other eye, and he watches his brothers through his skin.

The shadows peel, and walk.

"Again?" one of them says.

"He's one of those guys," says the other. "Gets the flu three times every winter."

"If he'd wait another week, it'd be spring."

He can feel them all waiting for him.

(Diplomatic actions are always his territory.)

_But how do you tell someone they're dead?_

They're waiting.

* * *

Raphael is impatient.

_Come on, Leo. Talk to them. Do your leader thing._

It's been almost a year since the battle with Shredder, and Raph is not going to wait any longer.

_Five seconds, Leo. One... two..._

* * *

Leo scrapes together everything he knows about ghosts (_not enough, not enough_), and arranges the words inside his head. It's a good speech, full of warding phrases and noble invocations. But when he tries to say it, all that comes out is: "Don't come any closer."

* * *

_"Don't come any closer?"_ he berates himself. _This is how you protect your family?_

* * *

_Come on, Leo, you can do better than that._

* * *

The shadows stop.

"That you, Rod?" one of them says. "You really shouldn't be here, if you're contagious."

"You shouldn't be here if you're _sick_," says the other, with much more compassion.

_They're people_, Leo realizes. _Talk to them like people._

He scrapes together everything he knows about humans, and prays that it's enough.

* * *

"Don't be afraid," he says, and hopes it comes off as reassuring and not creepy.

"Who are you?" the first shadow challenges.

"We want to help you," Leo says. "You -"

"_We?_ We who? Is this some kind of prank?"

"No," Leo says, trying to be patient and project calm. "If you'll just listen a minute -"

"No, you listen," the shadow says. "I am the shift manager, and if you don't come out right now I will call the plant superintendent and -"

He doesn't think this is a real possibility, but he's not even going to listen to it.

"Don't you threaten me," he ices. "This is _my_ home."

"Bullshit," says the shadow. "This is a sewage plant."

"It _used_ to be a sewage plant," Don says. "The scrap heap one of you tripped over _used_ to be your water tank."

The shadows are silent a moment. Then one of them says: "I'm giving you one more chance to get out."

* * *

This isn't going well. The shadows are completely entrenched in their current reality. They're living their second life as a translucent continuation of their first, and have completely forgotten about the Change.

There is nothing his sons can say that will make them believe. He will have to show them.

He gathers his energies, and focuses them carefully. His sons do not remember their first lives at all, and there is no reason to make them do it now.

He fixes the shadows firmly in his mind, and pushes the wave outward.

* * *

"Go and look," Leo says. "We're not -"

He freezes as something unseen whispers past him.

* * *

Leonardo remembers light glinting off a curve of broken glass.

* * *

Michelangelo remembers a long, gray face, spattered with green.

* * *

Donatello remembers climbing on wriggling bodies, looking over a tin rim.

* * *

Raphael remembers a fall, a crash, fear, pain.

* * *

Splinter opens his eyes.

His sons are sitting very still, staring blankly at nothing.

"My sons," he says softly, and they recover, turn towards him.

"That was creepy," Michelangelo says.

He wants to ask what they saw, but now is not the time.

"Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God..." one of the shadows is saying.

"Who _are_ you?" says the other.

* * *

Leonardo understands.

Splinter has touched the minds of the ghosts, made them remember who they really are, up to the very last moments of their lives.

The moments when they realized they were dying.

Now he can talk to them as the people they were in those moments, the people they were before they regressed to less than themselves.

"My name is Leonardo," he says. "These are my brothers Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael, and our father, Splinter."

"Are you some kind of hippies?" the shadow asks suspiciously.

"No," Leo says. He waits. Then he prompts them: "This is the part where you tell us your names."

"Uh," says the shadow. "Gary."

"Jason," says the other.

"So..." says Gary. "We're dead? Are you, uh..."

"No," says Raph.

"We live here," Leo says, even though this didn't go over well the first time.

"Yeah," says Gary. "I really gotta ask - _why_ are you living in a - in a former sewage plant?"

"And when did this place close?" Jason asks.

"You can't see us, at all?" Mike says tentatively.

The shadows seem to shake their heads.

"There are good reasons," Leo says. "Please accept our word for it."

"As for why the plant closed," Don says, "in a word, you." He repeats the salient details from the newspaper article.

"Wait," says Jason. "How long have we been dead? Is it the 5th?"

"Today is August 12th, 2005," Don says.

* * *

"_2005?_" Gary shouts.

"Are you time-travelling aliens?" Jason asks. Mike recognizes the desperation in his voice, the thin hope that a mistake has been made, and that things are not quite as dire as they seem.

"Wrong," says Raph, "and wrong again."

"I'm a good person!" Gary's shadow jerks around in agitation. "I go to church every week!"

"You must have gotten stuck -" Leo tries.

"This is your fault!" Gary yells at him.

"No, it isn't!" Leo's hands curl into fists. "You -"

"Everybody calm down!" Mike waits for the shadow to back off, for Leo to breathe himself into calmness. "Nothing is anybody's fault." He looks at the shadows. "What do you guys want? How can we help?"

The shadows shift on their feet.

"My family?" Gary asks. "Are they -? Can I -?"

"They can't come here," Leo says, "and I doubt you can go there."

"You could write a letter," Don offers.

"Okay," Gary says. "Let's do that."

"Can I write one too?" Jason asks. "I'm kind of late getting home from work, I guess, and my parents will be worried..."

"Your _parents?_" Mike blurts.

"What? You guys still live with your dad."

"We're only eighteen," Leo says.

"I'm twenty-four and paying off college loans," Jason says.

The mutants look at each other.

"Okay," Leo says faintly. "Where do they live?"

* * *

"'Course," Raph says, "they mighta moved."

"I'll look them up." Don stands and heads to his lab. The Jason-shadow drifts after him.

"Also," Raph says, "we don't got any paper."

"Yes, we do," Mike says. He rolls to his feet, goes over to the lockers, and rummages through them. There's a slightly battered spiral notebook. The front is full of someone's algebra notes, but the back is empty.

He returns to the mattresses. "There are pencils in the kitchen," he says.

Leo gets up and goes in that direction.

"Who are you writing to?" Mike asks.

"My wife," Gary says. "And my son." The shadow shifts, as though it's sitting down. "He'd be about your age..."

"Is that Nicholas?" Mike asks.

"How'd you know that?" Gary demands.

"Yeah," Raph says. "How'd you know that?"

"You told me," Mike says. "You used to tell him bedtime stories. You love him very much." His eyes flick to his own father, sitting quietly on the other mattress.

Leo returns then, and Mike takes the pencil from him.

"I'm not ready," Gary says. "A few more days won't matter, right?"

"No," Mike says, though he remembers the pain of waiting, every day waiting, for a brother who doesn't come.

* * *

Donatello has lived his whole life in the shadows.

Still, it's disconcerting to be _followed_ by one that isn't his own.

Jason moves around the walled-off space while Don waits for his monitor to come back to life.

"Chlorine leak, huh?" Jason says. "I told them the meter needed replacing. They just kept putting it off. 'Oh,' they said, 'we'll just fix everything at the same time.'" He shakes his head. "This is what happens when you let bureaucrats be in charge of the engineering, instead of the actual _engineers_."

Don jiggles the mouse again. _Don't be dead,_ he thinks at the computer. _If you're dead, I'll tear out your guts and turn you into a navigation system._

"Hey," Jason says. "This is my stuff."

"Not anymore," Don says, tapping some random keys.

"What did you do to my sensor array? What is this thing?"

Don glances at the receiver. "It doesn't work."

"Oh, that's nice. You wreck my equipment for something that doesn't even work."

"Come on!" Don growls at the monitor, shaking it a little. "Start!"

"Oh, get out of the way," Jason says. Don springs aside before the shadow can get too close to him. It reaches out a filmy gray arm, and instantly the monitor lights up.

"How'd you do that?" Don asks.

If the shadow had a face, it would be wearing a cocky grin. "You just have to know how to ask."

* * *

Leo watches the Gary-shadow pace back and forth.

"Guys," Mike whispers, leaning towards them. "I'm really tired. I think I'm gonna die."

"You're not gonna die," Raph whispers back. "Nobody _dies_ from being tired."

"Dude," Mike says, "that's _so_ not true. One time this guy stayed awake for a hundred hours, and -"

"Yeah, okay," Raph says.

Leo gets up and goes over to the shadow. "Walk with me," he says, and makes his footsteps loud so the ghost can follow.

They go into the dojo.

"We need to make some rules," Leo begins.

"Yeah?" Gary shoots back. "Who died and -" He breaks off.

"Look," Leo says. "I know this is a very strange situation. I don't think you can leave this place, so for now we're going to have to live together." He hears his own words, and tries again. "To share space. But I would like to treat you as a guest, and not as a prisoner."

"I'm listening," Gary says guardedly.

"If you're a guest," Leo says, "then I'm the host, and that means I make the house rules. And the first rule is, whatever's happening to Mike, it has to stop."

"I didn't do anything."

"_It stops._"

"I never -"

"You don't _touch_ him," Leo says, exuding all his anger through his voice, because the shadow can't see how dangerously narrow his eyes have gotten. "You don't go _near_ him. Am I making myself clear?"

"Yes," Gary says coldly.

"Good. If you hurt any of my family, I will see to it that you suffer. For a very long time." He makes himself breathe, and relax. "I don't know whether you sleep, but we need to. You can use this room until morning. Is there anything I can do for your... comfort?"

"You could make that cat stop glaring at me," Gary suggests.

Leo scoops up Klunk, ignoring her attempts to slash his wrists. "Good night," he says.

"Good night."

* * *

Raph sits still while Mike slips lower on his shoulder, trying half-heartedly to stay awake. He watches the shadows on the wall sag and run together.

"I think they are harmless," Splinter says.

Leo trudges out of the dojo and kneels heavily on the mattress. "I told him to stay in there until morning," he says. "But I'll stay up and watch..."

"No," Splinter says. "I will watch."

"Thank you," Leo says. He releases his death grip on Mike's cat, who immediately claims a prime spot and plants herself in it. Leo stretches out beside her and pulls up the blankets.

Mike succumbs to gravity and falls sideways, his head thumping against the pillow.

"Donnie's alone with that other guy," Raph says softly.

"He is safe," Splinter says. "Go to sleep."

Raph glances toward the lab, then nods and slides down in the makeshift bed, turning on his side and curling around Mike's shell.

In a moment, he's asleep.

* * *

Don is methodically hacking into federal census data, despite the fact that his vision is blurring and his head seems to weigh about as much as the Empire State Building.

"So," Jason says. "2005. Are people living on Mars yet?"

"No," Don says.

"Oh." Jason moves to the other side of the little space. Don has long since given up trying to track his endless wanderings. "Do we have telepathy helmets?"

"No."

"Moving sidewalks?"

Don closes his eyes, just for a minute, and rubs his forehead. "Would you please stop talking?"

"You don't have to be grouchy about it," Jason says, and lapses into blessed silence.

Don forces himself to focus, and carefully works his way around another firewall.

Somewhere around the seventh level of security, he falls asleep on the keyboard.

* * *

_Tick. Tick._

It's getting later, and there's no more _tap tap_ from Donatello's computer.

Splinter stands up and pads silently to the plywood wall.

When he peers around it, he sees exactly what he expected to: the slumped form of his son, fast asleep at his desk.

He thinks about waking him and sending him to bed, but Donatello would only argue, refuse sleep in a more suitable location, and continue his work.

Splinter notices that the computer is not making its characteristic hum.

"I turned it off," says the shadow in the corner. "Before it went nuts from him face-mashing the keyboard."

"Thank you," Splinter says. He still senses no malevolence from these spirits. Confusion, fear, anger at the situation... but no ill will, no desire to harm. "Would you like to join your - partner? He is in the cistern room."

"My boss," the shadow says. "Yeah. I'd better go see what you guys have done to my tanks."

He drifts out of the space, and Splinter watches him go across the main room and into the dojo.

He looks fondly at his quiet son, the one who stoically works himself to exhaustion for everyone else's benefit.

Then he returns to his other sons, who work hard and play hard and then, forgiving themselves for all the things they haven't yet finished, sleep with the untroubled innocence of children.


	12. Twelve

Twelve

_In eight months they hear from Leo only once. Apparently he's paranoid that their mail will be intercepted, because the letter is extremely terse and uninformative. _

_**Dear all, **_

_**Arrived safely at destination. Am working hard and learning a lot. Miss you very much but date of return unknown. **_

_**Love, L**_

_From this they can infer very little, except that sometime before April 16th - the date of the postmark - Leo was alive and well enough to write letters. _

_It's better than nothing._

* * *

Leo wakes up with something large and furry on his face.

He pushes Klunk off, picks the fur out of his eyes, and sits up.

"What time is it?" he mumbles. "Is it my turn to watch?"

"It is morning," Splinter says. He looks like he hasn't moved all night. "Everyone is safe."

But there are only three Turtles in the bed.

"Donnie?" he asks.

Splinter's gaze is steady, piercing into Leo's soul while not giving away anything of his own thoughts. "He is _safe_," he repeats. "He fell asleep at his work."

Leo doesn't even try to hide his need to go and check, to be sure.

Splinter sighs. "Go to him. But do not wake him."

Leo goes, his trust in his father barely tempering the speed lent by his fierce desire to protect.

He makes himself slow down, just outside the wooden wall, and enters silently.

Donatello is hunched into one of his trademark awkward positions, elbows splayed and neck bent nearly double.

He can't be comfortable.

But he isn't hurt.

Leo is grateful for the latter, and disappointed about the former. Disappointed that Donatello chose to do this to himself, yet again.

_Come on, Donnie. The mattress is RIGHT THERE._

Of course, if he could be relied on to put down his work and go to bed at a reasonable hour, then... he wouldn't be Donatello.

_Love the people they are._

He lets go, just a little.

* * *

When he fell asleep, there were two brothers.

Now there's only one.

"Oh my god!" he squeaks. "The ghosts abducted Leo!"

Raph snaps awake, and instantly reaches for his sai.

"They have done no such thing," Splinter says, loud enough to make Raph stop. "They are in the dojo, and have not caused any trouble."

"Where are the guys?" Raph asks, untangling himself from the blankets.

"Donatello fell asleep in his lab," Splinter says. "Leonardo has gone to look in on him."

Mike sits up and rubs his eyes. He slept in his gear, and now it's all askew. He fixes it.

He's retightening the strap of his elbow pad when he hears Leo's soft, measured footsteps coming up behind him. He turns his head.

"Morning," Leo says.

"Hey," Raph says. He pats the mattress. "We gotta put these away."

Leo nods.

* * *

Donatello wakes up and can't see anything.

He paws at his face and manages to pull off the bandana that slipped sideways during the night.

He's rewarded with a close-up view of his keyboard.

He feels _wrecked_.

* * *

He stumbles out of his workspace, and sees his brothers coming downstairs.

Good. He's not late.

"Hey guys," he says. "This may be a really weird question, but... was I, by any chance, drinking heavily last night?"

They pause on the steps, and blink at him.

He takes that as a _no_.

"Only I had a completely bizarre dream, and I can't remember what I was working on."

Leo crosses to him. "You were looking up that guy's parents."

A dim light comes on in his memories.

"You know," Mike says, coming down off the stairs. "So the dead dude can write a letter to them, and get out of our house."

"Am I still asleep?" he asks.

Raph helpfully slaps him.

He takes that as a _no_.

* * *

They all stand there, and Mike wonders What Happens Next.

Then Splinter comes out of his room and announces it's time for training, and Mike is pretty sure he's fallen into a reality warp where everything is normal _and shouldn't be_.

"Where?" he asks, and Splinter looks at him as though he's suddenly reverted to eating crayons. "In the dojo? Only, the ghost dudes are in there, and..." Even as he says it, he knows he's just run afoul of one of Splinter's Rules of Training. Namely, they should train in all kinds of conditions, because they never know what kind of conditions they might have to fight in.

(He's having a hard time conceiving of a situation where they would need to fight with ghosts watching, but... strange things happen to them.)

"Never mind," he mumbles.

* * *

Katas.

Thousands of them.

(Well, maybe. Mike knows how many different ones they've done, and he counts his way through the repetitions, but he's never been very good at multiplying.)

Usually, he hates katas, the excruciating boredom of executing the same pattern of moves again, and again, and _again_. He much prefers the act-and-react of sparring, opening his senses and engaging his mind to stay one step ahead of his opponent.

Right now, though, he's _totally_ working the narrow internal focus of katas.

He thinks of nothing outside his own body, and makes the world disappear.

_Step block counterstrike turn backstep strike..._

He sinks into the motions, for once not feeling compelled to add frills to the streamlined precision of the ancient techniques.

* * *

His joints are all out of whack from sleeping in the chair, and two hours of katas have done absolutely nothing to help.

When Splinter calls a halt, he simply slides to the floor.

The loose straw is scratchy, but it cushions his fall.

* * *

"Now," Splinter says, when all of his sons have taken up seated positions in front of him. "We must make good on our promises to our guests. As they cannot hold pens, who will write for them?"

"I will," Michelangelo says, surprising everyone, including himself.

Raphael leans forward to peer around Leonardo. "Were you even listening, Mikey?"

"Yeah, I was listening," Michelangelo says defensively. "I'll do it, okay?"

"I'll do one, if you want," Leonardo offers, deftly giving his brother a chance to back out of half the commitment.

"Thanks," Michelangelo says.

* * *

Mike hangs back, after everyone else has made their bows and gone to eat breakfast.

"I want to do it," he says, because he feels it needs to be said. "I think it should be me."

"Why?" Gary asks.

"I don't know," Mike says. "Why did you come to me at night, and never my brothers?"

"I don't know," Gary says.

Mike nods. "That's why it should be me."

* * *

They sit in the kitchen, peeling mostly-okay oranges and sorting out the good sections from the moldy ones.

Leo gives Mike a curious look when he joins them, but Mike only shakes his head. Leo offers him a section of orange. Mike pops it in his mouth and joins the peeling party.

Splinter excuses himself to catch up on the sleep he missed the night before.

They peel, and eat.

* * *

Don pushes himself to his feet, leaning heavily on the table.

Raph, guessing his intention, shoves a handful of orange sections in his mouth, shouts "Dibsh on da showa!" and races out of the room.

"Dibs on the other shower!" Mike says quickly, jumping up and going after Raph to debate the still-unresolved question of which is "the other shower".

Don shuffles to the sink and calmly draws a glass of water. Then he returns to the table and takes another handful of fruit. "Practice dissimulation," he says, "and you will succeed."

Leo doesn't think Sun Tzu was talking about how to get a bigger share of breakfast.

Don raises his glass, then winces and rolls his shoulder.

"Are you still sore from last night?" Leo asks.

"My fault," Don says, raising the glass again and drinking a little.

"Take off your pads," Leo says.

Don gives him a questioning look, but puts down his glass and obeys.

Leo takes Don's arm and works the elbow a few times. He feels along Don's shoulder, then yanks down hard on his wrist.

"Ah!" Don gasps, then: "_Aah._" He sighs in contentment. "You didn't mention _that_ when we asked you what you learned from the Ancient One."

"Let me do your neck," Leo says.

Don hesitates, for a fraction of a second.

"Never mind," Leo says, turning away to clear the table.

"No." Don reaches out with his fixed arm and grabs Leo's wrist. "It's okay." He searches Leo's face for a moment, then sits down, sweeping the tails of his mask forward and lowering his head.

Leo moves behind him, and slowly puts his hands on Don's shoulders. There's a jump of tension before the muscles relax. "Breathe in," he says softly, and sets to work.

* * *

Don cracks his knuckles – just in case he hasn't had enough of his joints cracked in the last half hour – and gets down to the serious business of hacking government databases.

"So," he says to Jason, who turned up shortly after Don's stint in the tentatively-labelled "other shower", and followed him back to the lab. "What are your parents' names?"

"Greer," Jason says. "John and Margaret."

"Pretty common names," Don says, as he begins again with the first layer of security. "Do you have any siblings who might be living with them?"

"No," Jason says. "It's just me."

"Good," says Don. "I like a challenge."

* * *

In the end, it isn't very challenging at all. There are a number of listings for John Greer, but when Don runs a Find command for the address Jason had given him earlier, the computer highlights a listing with a Margaret attached.

"They're still there," Don says.

"Aw, geez," says Jason. "Do you think my room is exactly the way I left it?"

"I wouldn't know," Don says, though he thinks of a room left untouched, frozen in time for eight months, until the ceiling caved in and entombed everything under crumbling rock.

* * *

Don finds his brothers in the kitchen, sitting with Gary and explaining, in an extremely circumspect way, who they are and why they're living in a former sewage plant.

Without a word, Don lays the spiral notebook on the table, setting his pencil on top of it.

Leo reads the upside-down address. "That's not far." He looks up. "Did you get the other one?"

"I will later," Don says. "The computer is busy running dummy searches, so if anyone notices my hack, they at least won't know what I was looking for."

"Good thinking," says Leo. He turns to the Jason-shadow. "Do you want to write your letter now?"

"Sure," Jason says.

Leo gives his brothers a meaningful look, and they quietly leave the kitchen. Jason must be giving Gary a similar look, because he too gets up and drifts out into the main room.

"So," says Gary, as they stand around, wondering what to do next. "All these enemies of yours, and the hiding... Are you criminals?"

"_No_," Raph says.

* * *

Leo turns to a clean page in the notebook, and waits.

Slowly, Jason begins to speak, spinning out words left unsaid. For him, hardly any time has passed. But for his parents, it's been fourteen years without their son. Jason does his best to bridge the vast distance, to say the things he needs to say, the things his parents need to hear.

Leo writes, and wonders where these words were when he needed them for himself.


	13. Thirteen

Thirteen

_Leo has nightmares in which his brothers are missing. _

_Just... missing. _

_He searches for them, in the dreams, but he doesn't know if they're near or far, hiding or captive, alive or dead. _

_It's the not-knowing that he hates the most. _

_He had these dreams, sometimes, while he was staying with the Ancient One, and he saw what his lack of communication must have been doing to his family. _

_He tried to write letters, but he couldn't find the words to express what he'd learned, to apologize for his mistakes, to say what he wanted them to know. _

_Finally, he just wrote a letter telling them he was safe. _

_The right words came to him, eventually, and during those interminable weeks on the boat he prayed he would have a chance to say them. _

_The words got lost in the excitement of reunion, the constant activity of preparing a new home, and now this strange business with the ghosts. _

_But they still need to be said._

* * *

It's afternoon.

Jason and Gary have withdrawn somewhere. Raph, Mike, and Don have returned to the kitchen in search of lunch.

"So," Raph says, nodding at the folded letter on the table. "What's it say?"

Leo smoothes his hands over the paper, flattening the creases. "It's private."

Raph turns back to the refrigerator, trying to figure out whether they have anything that might reasonably be put between two slices of bread and called a sandwich.

"Listen, guys..." Leo says. "Can we talk about something?"

His brothers glance at each other, and shrug.

"Anything in particular?" Don asks.

"About when I was away," Leo says. He fidgets with the letter. "I'm sorry I didn't write. I -"

"Okay, you know what?" Raph interrupts. He turns and slams a bottle of mustard onto the table. "I'm sick of that phrase. I don't want to hear it anymore."

"Sorry." Leo looks down and momentarily presses a finger to his lips. "No. You're right. It's not enough."

Raph sighs and turns back to his bread.

"I've made mistakes," Leo says. "And then I've hidden from them, or tried to fix things that were already finished, and only messed up the things I still had a chance to do right."

"Leo -" Don starts.

Leo holds up his hand. "I didn't write to you. There were things I needed to say, but I didn't know how to say them, so I said nothing. I thought I was avoiding a mistake, but I was only making a different one." Again he traces the edges of the folded paper. "I can't go back and write those letters. But I'd like to try now, to say the things I should have said sooner."

Raph abandons his unpromising sandwich, and sits down. "Go for it."

Leo twines his fingers. "The first thing I learned from the Ancient One is..." He sighs. "This is going to sound like passing the blame."

"Bro," Mike says, "you are _way_ over your blame quota. If anyone deserves to pass some blame, it's you."

Leo nods, and continues. "The first thing I learned, is that sometimes situations are against us, and there's nothing we can do. No matter how much we've prepared, or how much we want to... sometimes there is no victory."

"If there is no victory," Don quotes softly, "you must not fight."

"Don't always get a choice," Raph says bitterly.

"Exactly," Leo says. "Exactly. And I'm so s-" He catches himself. "Seriously, Raph, can't I -"

"_No._"

"I -" Leo fidgets momentarily, trying to grasp his thoughts. "I'm _angry_, that we were stuck in a situation where there was no choice, and no victory."

"This I like better," Raph says.

"I'm going to keep learning," Leo goes on, "so I'll be strong enough to win when there is victory, and smart enough to not fight when there is only defeat. But you need to know that there will be a battle that I can't win, and can't avoid. And when it comes, I want you to know... there was no other way."

"We know, Leo," Don says, putting his hand on top of his brother's. "We're not going to live forever."

"Yeah, bro," Mike says, adding his hand to the stack. "And we know you're not going to put us in danger for anything that's not worth it."

"We trust you," Raph says, laying his hand on top of the pile. "You've never let us down."

"You're forgiven," Don says, just in case Leo hasn't gotten the message.

"Except for the not-writing thing," Mike says. "You could've at least sent a postcard."

"Sorry," Leo says.

No one corrects him.

* * *

Splinter listens from just outside the door.

He was wrong, all those days when he thought Leonardo had come home too soon.

Leonardo's journey _is_ unfinished, and he _does_ have much left to learn.

But a longer absence would not have helped.

Life itself is a journey, and Leonardo's has brought him home again, to walk with his brothers and learn the things they did not have to go halfway around the world to know.

Splinter shakes his head. _I am an old rat, and still learning._

As long as life goes on, learning does not stop.

And for a young turtle, Leonardo has already learned a lot.

* * *

Don returns to his computer, kills the program passing random searches to the server, and tabs over to his main hack window. He enters the name Jason gave him.

Gary's wife has an unusual name, and seconds later the database has returned a single listing. Don copies it onto a scrap of paper stolen from the spiral notebook. Then he restarts the generator program, setting it to send a few thousand more meaningless queries.

_And while I'm here..._

He flips to his e-mail, and reloads the inbox.

New message.

It's a very interesting critique of his theory.

He gets absorbed in reading it, in formulating a reply. He pulls the keyboard forward, absently covering the scrap of paper.

By the time he gets up, he's forgotten all about it.

* * *

"So," Mike says. He's sitting on the floor of the main room, a little distance from the pool, watching Gary float back and forth over the water. "What was Nick like?"

"He was a happy kid," Gary says. "Always happy." He's silent a moment. "I hope he still is."

* * *

"Should one of us stay behind?" Leo asks, after dinner. "So you're not alone with them?"

Splinter shakes his head. "I will be all right."

Leo doesn't argue.

* * *

It's a leisurely half-hour walk through the sewers to Jason's parents' apartment building in the West 140's.

"Who wants to go?" Leo asks, when they reach the right intersection.

"You go," Raph says.

Leo wonders whether it's a gift or a test.

* * *

A few minutes later he's back, the letter still in his hand. "The mailboxes are inside," he says, "and all the lights are still on in the lobby."

"We could take it upstairs?" Mike suggests.

Leo turns to Don. "Do you know the apartment number?"

Don shakes his head. "The address wasn't listed that way. And I didn't think to ask."

"We can scout the windows," Raph says. "I got north."

And he simply climbs up the ladder and disappears.

* * *

Don looks through another window.

This is an untouched room if he's ever seen one. No self-respecting living person would still have an Apple II on their desk.

He pulls his phone from his belt.

"I found it," he says.

* * *

It takes Leo a few minutes to work around to the west side of the building. "Are you sure?" he asks, peering cautiously into the empty bedroom.

"That computer was made in the late '80s," Don says. He points to a framed parchment on the wall. "Bet that's his diploma. Go look."

"You go look," Leo says.

"We'll both go look." Don jimmies open the window, and they slip inside.

Most of the diploma is in Latin, but at the bottom it says _Jason Greer_ in ornate handwriting.

"Am I good or what?" Don whispers.

Leo cracks the door and peeks into the hallway. He moves on silent feet towards the front of the apartment.

He pauses at the first doorway, pressing himself against the wall and listening before edging around the frame.

It's a kitchen, and he intends to move on, but something catches his eye.

On the wall above the table is a photograph of a young man.

He moves softly into the room, his eyes fixed on the picture.

A person has been here, and gone, and left a shadow that has not quite faded.

He tucks the letter into a corner of the frame.

* * *

Don runs his fingers lightly over a half-dismantled ham radio.

_This is like my room._

Leo appears in the doorway. "Let's go."

"Mike and Raph are waiting on the roof," Don murmurs, as they climb out onto the fire escape. Leo nods for him to go ahead.

"Ya do it?" Raph asks, as soon as Don steps onto the tarpaper.

"It's done," Don says.

A moment later Leo joins them, his head down and his expression clouded.

"You okay?" Raph asks.

"Yeah," Leo says. "I'm fine."

* * *

They came underground, but they return through the sky. Mike enjoys it even more than his run with Raph three days ago.

It's over too soon.

When they open the door to the Lair, Splinter is waiting for them. A single shadow floats beside him.

"He's gone," the shadow says.

* * *

"I was talking to him," Gary says, "and then, just... gone."

"That's good, right?" Mike says. "That's what we were trying to do."

"It's damn scary," Gary says. "Where did he _go_?"

"A better place," Leo says firmly. And then again, quieter: "A better place."

It has to be. It's hard to do worse than an old sewage plant.

* * *

Raph reclines in his hammock, bouncing a tennis ball off a chalk mark on the wall, and thinking about things.

There's a soft tapping at the door.

"Yeah?" he says.

Leo edges in. "Are you busy?"

"Yeah, Leo. Meetings, deadlines, all that stuff." Raph sits up. "Nah, I got nothin'. What's up?"

Leo closes the door behind him. "What you said earlier," he begins. "About me never letting you down. How can you mean that?"

"Uh..." Raph frowns. "'Cause ya never did?"

"But on the spaceship," Leo says. "You asked me for help, and I..." He turns his face away. "I did nothing."

"Huh?" Raph searches his memory. "When did that happen?"

Leo gives him an odd look. "After the fight with the Shredder. He went to do something else, and then he was coming back to finish us... and you, all of you, asked me to fight again, to protect you, but I couldn't get up..."

"Leo..." Raph says slowly. "You were _unconscious_ after that fight."

Leo blinks. "What?"

"You were _unconscious_," Raph repeats. "We all fought our best. We were all down for the count. Nobody blames you. Nobody asked you to do any more."

Leo's eyes tick back and forth as he tries to process this. "But... it didn't happen?"

"_It didn't happen._"

"It didn't... and when I said goodbye to you..." Leo looks scared. "Raph, what's wrong with me? Do I have a memory problem?"

"Nah," Raph says. "You have an accepting-reality problem." He softens at the look of horror on Leo's face. "You just, y'know, make things worse than they are. Which sometimes is a good thing. And sometimes..." He squeezes the ball in his hand. "You seriously have been goin' around all year thinkin' that - ?"

Leo nods.

"Geez," Raph says. "No _wonder_ you kept railin' on about bein' a failure. Why didn't you _say_ something?"

"I didn't know," Leo says softly. "I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"Hey," Raph says. "What did I say about that phrase?"

Leo leans against the wall. "I wasted so much time. _Our_ time. Time we can't get back."

"This is time we didn't think we'd have anyway," Raph says. Leo looks up at him. "Do you remember? After the fight with the Shredder, after you came to, you asked us if we wanted to sacrifice ourselves to take him down. And we said yes. But then -"

"The Utroms rescued us," Leo says, "and exiled the Shredder."

"We _won_ that battle, bro," Raph says. "We _won_."

"But all I offered you was a draw," Leo says.

Raph slides out of the hammock, crosses the room, and puts his hand on his brother's shoulder. "And we were _okay_ with that. Anything we have now is a bonus."

"But -" Leo starts.

"Hey." Raph shakes him a little. "I don't care. You're back, we love you, stop hating yourself." He ducks his head a little to meet Leo's eyes. "Okay?"

Leo smiles a little. "Okay."

"Go to bed, bro."

Leo nods. "Good night, Raph."

"G'night, Leo."

* * *

Don sits at his computer for a while, carefully backing out of the government computer systems, erasing his tracks as he goes.

The alcove is quiet.

He rubs his eyes, refocuses, finishes his work.

He sighs, stretches, and closes all his programs.

While he waits for the computer to shut down, he idly picks up the Tracker receiver and waves it around.

In the narrow space behind the plywood wall, it blinks single digits.


	14. Fourteen

Fourteen

_There's a Leo-shaped hole where their brother used to be, and it's bigger than they had expected. _

_For a while they just edge around it, as if it is a physical pit in the middle of their home, that all of them are trying to avoid falling into. _

_But the gradually accumulating weight of things undone presses them closer and closer to the black depths. _

_Finally, Splinter picks up the tasks he had started delegating to Leonardo, taking them back onto himself, silently carrying them. _

_His three sons, too, begin to creep in around the edges, cautiously picking up the things they always relied on their eldest brother to take care of, putting them on their own shoulders, trading until everyone is carrying the burden they are best suited to. _

_Still, none of them carry the weight as well as Leonardo did. _

_And still, it takes weeks for them to stop looking for him, even longer until they stop finding themselves in his room at night, looking at his cold and empty bed. _

_But they move on, they make do, and they learn to live with one less._

* * *

Mike stands in the doorway of Leo's room.

"Are you coming in?" Leo asks. "Or are you spending the night over there?"

A moment later Mike is under the blue blanket, curling up with his back against his brother's chest. He closes his eyes.

"Mike..." Leo says after a while.

"Uh?"

"Do you think there's a better place for us?"

"It's fine, Leo," Mike says, purposely misunderstanding. "This place is great."

"You know what I mean."

"What, when we die?" Mike shifts against the pillow. "Mutant turtles never die, bro. They just have a secondary mutation."

"_Mikey._"

"I don't want to talk about it, okay?"

"Okay."

They're silent for a few minutes.

"Leo?"

"Mm?"

"Tell me a story? About Japan?"

Leo is quiet, thinking. "When Master Yoshi was -"

"No," Mike interrupts. "A happy story."

Another pause. "Okay," Leo says. "This one is kind of funny. Once, not long after I arrived, the Ancient One decided..."

* * *

In the morning, instead of training his sons as a group, Splinter takes each of them for private instruction, in a corner of the main room. At the end of Leonardo's sword lesson - his first since the disastrous one before his journey to Japan - Leonardo kneels.

"Master," he says formally. "Thank you for this lesson. I knew you had more to teach me."

"I was only waiting for you to be ready to learn it," Splinter replies.

"Sensei -" Leonardo ventures. "Can I ask you a question?"

Splinter kneels, signaling that he has nowhere else to be. "Always, my son."

Leonardo runs his thumbs over the ribbing of his kneepads. "What happened on the Shredder's spaceship?"

"Leonardo," Splinter says, but his son does not raise his eyes. "Why do you continue to dwell on these things?"

"I need to know," Leonardo says. "What did I do in that fight?"

"You did as much as you could have," Splinter says gently. "You fought well. Our enemy fought better. We were defeated." Then he poses a question of his own: "We have been defeated in battle before. Why has this one been so difficult for you?"

Leonardo studies a spot on the floor. "I thought I didn't do enough. I thought I did all I could, and then you asked for more. I thought I failed you. But Raph said... Raph said that you never..."

"My son," Splinter says. "You have always been the one who asks the most from yourself. You have never been a failure in my eyes."

"It was me," Leonardo says. "_I_ asked for more. I let _myself_ down." He's quiet for a moment, and Splinter lets him think. "But... maybe I needed to. Maybe I needed to be that unsatisfied, to see my small problems as big problems, so I could fix them." He looks up, finally. "Is that why you sent me away?"

Splinter answers with a question. "What did you learn from the Ancient One?"

"That I was fighting all the wrong things," Leonardo replies. "Fighting, and training, will only get me so far. I can't go forward until I look inside and resolve the things that are holding me back."

Splinter nods. "That is why I sent you away."

"But I don't understand," Leonardo says, "why I had to go to Japan to learn this. What's different there that..." He looks worried. "It isn't my _family_ holding me back?"

"Your relationship with your brothers," Splinter says slowly. "It is complicated. It consumes you. You needed this distance, and this return, to understand that they love you not for what you do, but for who you are."

"Why didn't I know that?" Leonardo says softly.

"Because you show your love by doing," Splinter says. "That is your way of being. Your brothers are wise enough to see how your actions come from your nature, and to direct their love at this deepest part of you."

Leonardo is quiet for a long time, almost meditative in his silence. Splinter waits for him.

"Sensei," Leonardo says at last. "Can I ask you another question? On a completely different subject."

"Of course," Splinter says.

"When you gave the ghosts a form," Leonardo says. "I... felt something. I saw something. What was it?"

Splinter wants very much to know the answer to that question, but it will only cause his son pain and confusion. "Do not worry about it," he says.

Leonardo doesn't move. "Please, Sensei."

Splinter regards his eldest child. "What did you see?" he asks.

"I saw a piece of broken glass," Leonardo says. "But it seemed... very big."

"This was a memory from before your Change," Splinter says. "When you were very small."

Leonardo considers this. "Then those memories... are still here?" He raises his hand to his head. "Could you bring them back?"

"I _would_ not," Splinter says. "I did not mean to give you that one. I am sorry if I hurt you."

Leonardo shakes his head. "I will always take anything that you give me." He slides his hands from his knees and bows to the floor. "Thank you, Sensei."

In that moment, Splinter feels a great sadness for his sons, for things given and for things withheld. Then he lowers his head. "You are welcome, my son."

* * *

After his sai lesson, Raph spends some time in the dojo, beating up the sandbag. The lone shadow floats around, unable to see him, watching the effects of his actions.

"Are you a boxer?" Gary asks.

"Keep guessin'," Raph says, throwing himself into a spin-kick. "You might get it right one a' these days."

* * *

Don comes out of the shower, rubbing his head with a towel and feeling like he's forgotten something. Leo is standing by the pool, looking at the water and pretending not to be watching Mike's lesson out of the corner of his eye.

"Did you find the other address?" Leo asks.

"Thank you," Don says. "You wouldn't happen to remember where I put it?"

Leo glances at him. "I think I might have seen it in the kitchen, behind the cereal."

"Ah," Don says. "I had better go look, then."

* * *

A few minutes later, bowl of cereal in hand, towel accidentally left behind on a kitchen chair, Don goes into his lab and proceeds to search for the address. It takes him a while, because he looks at his computer, and that gets him thinking about how the electricity is working perfectly right now, despite not being connected to anything, and he wonders how long this state of affairs will last, and whether there will still be a 'wiring problem' when it ends. Then he remembers what he came in for, shuffles some things on his desk, and finds the scrap of paper under the keyboard.

When he goes back out into the main room, Raph has joined Leo by the pool. He offers the paper to both of them.

Raph reads Don's slanted handwriting. "That's in Brooklyn Heights." He glances to the side of the room, where Mike and Splinter are bowing to each other. "I'm gonna jump in the first shower," he announces, "before Mike steals it again."

"Can I keep this?" Leo asks, as Raph walks off.

Don shrugs. "Sure. It wasn't behind the cereal though."

"Ah," Leo says. "My mistake."

* * *

On second thought, Raph decides, the 'other shower' is better.

He slings the towel over his shoulders and wanders out onto the catwalks.

Below, Leo is looking thoughtfully at a wall. It's covered in little angular chalk markings.

Raph jumps down and goes to see what Leo has done. He presumes it's some kind of a Plan. Delivering the first letter was a mere Outing, but the fact that the second one is going off-island will have elevated it, in Leo's mind, to a Mission.

Raph understands Leo's shorthand, but he can't make heads or tails of this, aside from a rectangle inside of an oval, with a second tilted oval off to the side.

It's a map of New York. Leo has covered it with a myriad of dotted lines, and littered it with other symbols, many of which are followed by a question mark.

Leo is standing with his hand raised, poised to add another mysterious shape. Raph plucks the chalk from his hand, and Leo startles, as though he hadn't noticed that anyone was watching him.

"Chill out, Leo," Raph says. He leans forward and draws a solid line down the left side of the rectangle, sweeping it down and right to the second oval. "Look. Blue Line. Underground the whole way, take us straight there." He tosses the stub of chalk back, and Leo catches it reflexively. "Don't make it worse, okay?"

Leo rubs out the marks that are floating in the East River. "It's a long way."

"Pretty sure Japan is further," Raph says.

"That was different," Leo says.

Raph raises his brows, but Leo doesn't elaborate. He just rolls the chalk up and down his finger, leaving a white smudge on his skin. "Do you want this one?" he asks.

"Not really," Raph says. He leans against the wall, and part of Long Island transfers itself to his shoulder. "Look, Leo, I'm giving up the leader thing. It's yours." He offers a lopsided grin. "I was only keepin' yer seat warm."

"We could share," Leo suggests.

Raph snorts. "As if you didn't run most stuff past me anyway." He sobers. "But seriously, _somebody's_ gotta have the last word. That's you."

"I don't..." Leo starts, and trails off.

"What," Raph says, "do you want to take a vote or somethin'? 'Cause you would win, bro. And not out of habit or whatever. You're the best. You always were."

Leo presses his finger against Lower Manhattan. "How long will this take? Round-trip?"

"Four hours," Raph says. "Barring surprises."

Leo nods. "We'll leave at midnight."

* * *

"You have good kids," Gary says.

Splinter moves slowly into another stretch. His skills are still as good as they ever were, but the practice of them does not come as cheaply. "I am sure your son has also grown into a fine young man."

"Yeah," Gary says. "You're lucky, though. You got to see your boys grow up."

Splinter does not reply. He knows very well how lucky he has been.

"So, you're living here, hiding from your enemies..." Gary says. "For how long? What's next for you?"

"I do not know," Splinter says, shifting his stretch to the other side. "I hope that one day it will be safe for us to live elsewhere. In the meantime, I find it wise to celebrate our luck and patiently bear our misfortune."

"I hope that works out for you," Gary says. "You seem like good guys, who deserve it."

"Thank you," Splinter says.

The shadow hovers behind him as he moves into another set of stretches.

"Where do you think I'll go?" Gary asks. "After this?"

Splinter comes back to his center, then pushes his arms above his head, raising his hands to the ceiling. "Where do _you_ think you will go?"

"I thought I would go to heaven," Gary says. "I didn't know I would get... left behind."

"Some journeys take longer than others," Splinter comments. He breathes deeply, holds it a moment, lets it out. "One may stop for a long time before finding the need, or the way, to move on."

Gary is quiet for a while.

"I think I'm ready to write that letter," he says.

* * *

Leo is coming up the stairs as Mike bounces down them.

Leo stops, and so Mike does too.

"We're leaving at midnight," Leo says. It's not exactly a command. Simply a statement that he expects to be proven true.

Mike smiles. "Sure thing, Fearless."

* * *

When he gets to the kitchen, a shadow is hanging in the far corner.

"Yo," he says. (It's amazing, how fast he can get used to weirdness.)

"Which one are you?" the shadow asks.

"I'm Mike," he says, rummaging in the cabinets for something that looks like breakfast.

"Good," the shadow says. "I mean - well, look. You said you would write my letter, but your brother said I'm not allowed near you, so I don't know..."

"I think that was temporary," Mike says. He pulls out a box of some prepackaged thing that has the nerve to call itself a pastry. "It's cool now. Just no more strangling, okay?"

"No," Gary says, drifting a little closer to the table. "Sorry about that."

Mike waves his hand. "Forgiven." He unwraps one of the faux pastries, picks up the pencil, and spins it through his fingers. "You ready to write?"

Gary hovers over a chair. "Can I write two letters?"

Mike thumbs through the notebook. Plenty of pages. "Sure."

"Okay," Gary says. "Here's the first one. 'Dear Viola...'"

* * *

The first letter is a litany of romantic regrets, and Mike feels like a voyeur. He tries to let the words flow through him, to go directly from his ears to his hand without touching his brain.

The second letter ("Dear Nicky") is different. Listening with his head down, Mike can't help hearing echoes of a Splinter Lecture. The message is different, but it has the same ring.

The same sense of urgency. The same need to transmit hard-won wisdom to the next generation. The same desire, born of love, to not see one's children make the same mistakes.

It's more a list than a letter, a quietly desperate enumeration of all the things Gary would have liked to tell his growing son, and never got the chance to.

"Love forever and always," Gary finishes softly, "Daddy."

Mike makes the two strokes of the _y_, and lays down his pencil.

"Let me see," Gary says.

Mike turns the notebook around, and the shadow leans forward, reading. "Aah, what was I thinking," Gary says. "This sounds like it was written to a four-year-old. I can't call him Nicky."

"My brothers can always call me Mikey," Mike says, "no matter how old and wrinkly we get."

The shadow moves back a little. "What about your dad?"

"He never calls us by nicknames," Mike says. "But if he did, I'd let him do it forever. I'm bigger than him, but I'm still his little boy."

"You know," Gary says, "I didn't know you when you were younger, obviously, but I think that's still in you. The four-year-old, and the eight-year-old, and the twelve-year-old you used to be, are still part of you. More than for most people."

"Yeah," Mike says. "I get that a lot. 'Grow up, Mikey.' 'Act your age, Mikey.' What's so bad about holding onto a little childhood innocence?"

"Nothing," Gary says. "I think that's why I came to you. Because I see my son in you, the way I remember him. And now I see in you all the things -" His voice breaks. "All the things I didn't get to see in him..."

"I can't give you back your son," Mike says. "But maybe, with this -" he taps the letter "- I can go a little way towards giving your son back his father."

The shadow seems to nod. "Yes. Yes."

Mike pushes the pages of writing forward. "Are these the letters you want to send?" he asks gently.

Gary reads the letters again, slowly. "If these are my last words on earth..." he says. "I'm okay with that. Please deliver them."

"I will," Mike says. "That's a promise."


	15. Fifteen

Fifteen

_From Splinter's gentle games, they learn to be alert for the soft __**ch**__, to react even before they hear the __**click**__. _

_The first time they encounter a real enemy with a real gun, they are fifteen. Somewhere between the click and the bang, Leonardo suddenly understands exactly what Splinter has been trying to teach them all these years. After the bang, his mind is screaming, trying to reject all the things he's spent his whole life learning. He doesn't want this - doesn't want the strength and skill and confidence, if it only leads to suffering and agony and death. _

_But somewhere between the click and the bang, his body __**moved**__. And after the bang, he's still safe and whole, and so are his brothers. _

_He'll lead them all home tonight. _

_And he'll hug his father._

* * *

They leave at midnight, the letters tucked safely into Mike's belt. They slosh through the sewer tunnels under the park, their new neighborhood, the passages that have become familiar over the past weeks. Somewhere around 77th, they let themselves into the Blue Line service tunnels.

And then they simply walk.

All the way to Brooklyn.

* * *

They exit the subway line near High Street, moving into the local sewers, heading southwest into Brooklyn Heights.

As usual, Raph seems to know exactly where he's going, and Leo lets him lead the way. Still, he can't help feeling just a little on edge. This is not their turf. And, no matter what Raph says about not making things worse, he can't quite believe that nothing will happen on this trip.

Nothing is _ever_ easy for his family.

He follows closely behind Raph, keeping his senses alert to the shadows in the tunnel, the footsteps of his brothers behind him.

When Raph stops, Leo doesn't bump into him.

"Think it's here," Raph breathes.

Leo looks back at Mike, silently asking him what he wants to do.

Mike moves to the ladder.

* * *

He lifts the manhole cover carefully and peeks out. On both sides of the street are narrow townhouses, one against the other. They all look pretty much alike.

"What number?" Mike whispers towards his feet.

The answer floats up. "1652."

In one smooth motion he's out of the manhole and on his way to a roof. He hears the cover scrape into place behind him.

He works down the roofs of the odd-numbered houses, looking at the numbers on the opposite side of the street. 1646, 1648... 1652.

He crouches and studies his target.

Some of the houses still have lights on, but this one is dark. Just one weak bulb above the front door.

Above the mailbox.

He estimates it will take him less than ten seconds to jump down, put the letters in the box, and vanish.

He feels that the task he's been charged with deserves more than ten seconds.

He sits on the roof, thinking about home and family and absence.

* * *

Don leans against the wall. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes.

Leo lasts almost twenty minutes before moving towards the ladder.

"Wait," Raph says.

Leo waits, but his grip on the metal rung gets tighter and tighter as the minutes tick by.

* * *

Don is extremely impressed by Leo's level of self-control. He thinks it's been about half an hour since Mike went topside.

A sudden crescent of light widens into a circle, and Mike drops down, almost landing on Leo.

"Are you okay?" Leo asks.

"I'm fine," Mike says, reaching up to pull the cover back into its recess. "We done here?"

Leo nods, and leads them home.

* * *

When they get back to the Lair, the lights are off. The room is illuminated only by the stub of a candle.

Splinter is waiting for them. "I believe you have been successful," he says.

Don goes over to the generator, reconnects some loose wires, and starts cranking. The lights flicker on after about thirty seconds, but he keeps cranking, building up power in the battery.

Raph nudges Leo. "What did I tell ya? Four hours, twenty-one minutes." He turns to Mike. "What took ya so long up there?"

"Moment of silence," Mike says absently.

"Some moment." Raph tilts his head. "You okay, bro?"

Mike looks up and smiles. "Sure." He takes a step towards the kitchen. "Post-mission snack?"

* * *

They congregate in the kitchen.

They share a box of crackers, and talk about ordinary things, and Mike enjoys having a normal evening with his family.

With his family, and not with any guests, invited or otherwise. Free to be themselves, and feel safe, and talk about whatever they want.

This is home.

And it's sweeter than any fruit.

* * *

Raph goes upstairs after a while, and Mike, each to their own rooms.

Don gets up too, and Leo looks at him with a kind of lonely hope in his eyes.

Don pauses as he moves past, puts his hand on his brother's shoulder, leans close to his ear. "I'm using the mattress," he whispers.

Leo smiles.

* * *

Leonardo remains at the table, and so Splinter does as well.

"I thought about what you said," Leonardo begins, as the clock ticks past five AM. "I think I understand." He shifts slowly, resting his arms on the table. "Sometimes the best thing I can do for them, is to do nothing, so they find their own strength."

Splinter waits.

"They've gotten so much stronger," Leonardo continues. "In so many ways." He turns his hands over, looks at his palms. "But I know we all still have a lot to learn. Will you send them on journeys of their own, someday?"

"Someday, maybe," Splinter replies. "But I am not yet ready to let them go."

Leonardo smiles. "Me neither." He looks up. "This is going to be hard, isn't it. Not protecting them from everything."

"Yes," Splinter says. "But it will make you stronger as well."

"Stronger," Leonardo says softly. "I'm so tired of being strong."

"You have been tired for a long time," Splinter says, "and you have hidden it from your brothers. In your absence, they began to understand how much you do for them. They will help you carry this weight, if you ask them."

"I can't," Leonardo says.

"You must," Splinter says firmly. He cannot skirt around this point any longer. "You do them no favors by keeping them ignorant of their own power."

"I know," Leonardo says. He lowers his head again. "I have to let them fight, because the battle will come to them and they need to be ready. I have to let them go, so I can hold onto them." His fingers clench, and he looks out the door, to the still-bare main room. "I want to hold them forever. But I know that someday, somehow, one of us is going to leave and not come back."

Splinter puts his hand over his son's, and Leonardo's gaze comes back to him. "That is a journey I would like to delay for a long time."

Leonardo opens his fingers, accepting his father's hand. "It seems so wrong, to let them go any more, any sooner, than I have to. But -" He holds Splinter's hand a little tighter. "I trust your teaching. I have to now, a little. And I will try."

"I know you will," Splinter says. He smiles fondly at Leonardo. "My wise, tired son. Go to bed."

Leonardo ducks his head. "Yes, Sensei." Then he half-rises from his chair, leans across the table, and puts his other arm around Splinter. "Good night... Father."


	16. Sixteen

Sixteen

_When Leo wakes up, he thinks he's dead._

_Understandable. He's in a white room, he can't feel his body, and the last thing he remembers is being on a spaceship, pointlessly trying to run away from the exploding power core._

_Then an Utrom is hovering over him, asking him how he feels._

_He feels relieved. He didn't want to die._

_Later he feels angry, useless. He __**should**__ have died. They __**all**__ should have died, and it would have been his fault._

_He's been given a second life (or is it a third life, now?), but he doesn't know what to do with it. He's not a leader. He's nothing._

_He avoids his brothers on the Utrom ship. He avoids them at the farmhouse. He avoids them in the Lair. Then he goes away from them for eight months._

_While he's on his way home from the long journey, cursing every mile for the damn ship to go faster, they almost die again._

_Now they're on their __**fourth**__ lives, and Leo can't believe how lucky he is, to get so many chances._

_He can't believe how __**stupid**__ he is, to __**need**__ so many._

_From death, new life. From endings, new beginnings._

_This time, he's going to get it right._

* * *

Mike sleeps soundly in his own bed, and wakes to a new day.

* * *

They've graduated back to sparring with weapons.

Raph kneels on the side, next to Don, and watches his brothers with a practiced eye.

Leo's strikes are precise, efficient, and they're not weighed down by overcaution.

Mike fights with his usual easy confidence, drawing out his opponent and then attacking weaknesses with lightning speed. He's making full use of his talent and training, blending them seamlessly and moving so smoothly he looks untouchable.

But Leo really _is_ better than he used to be.

In the end, Mike yields.

But from the look on his face, it's impossible to say that he lost.

* * *

On his way to breakfast, Mike notices that there are four shadows on the wall again, each with its owner's name or initial inside.

In a few months, maybe, or a year, he and his brothers will draw over these shadows, adding another layer. And they will step back, and laugh about how small they used to be.

He thinks of their original shadow-wall, the one the Mousers ate. Then he shakes his head. He can't go back. But he can carry the past with him as he goes forward.

He bounces into the kitchen.

* * *

After breakfast, Raph lingers at the table, tracing his finger over a blank page of the notebook and wondering how he's going to keep himself occupied now that the Lair is mostly in order and life has gone back to normal.

The lights go off.

"Damnit!" Raph shouts.

"It's just me!" Don shouts back.

"Some warning would be nice!" Mike calls from upstairs.

"You're a ninja!" Don replies. "Deal with it!"

The lights go back on.

And they stay on.

* * *

Raph wanders out to the main room. Don is sitting on the floor, dismantling the generator.

"What are you going to do with it now?" he asks, after watching the deconstruction for a few minutes.

"I'm not sure," Don says. "A car is more convenient as family transportation, but a motorcycle is more fun."

"Decisions, decisions," Raph says.

"I'm not immune to persuasion," Don suggests.

Raph laughs. "Hey. As long as it's fast."

Don smiles at his work. "Oh, it _will_ be fast."

* * *

Leo moves aimlessly around the Lair, purposely staying away from his brothers.

They've welcomed him back to the family, but not to his old place in it. And if he is not in that place, not near them, not watching over them… he doesn't know where he _is_.

He finds himself in the doorway of Mike's room.

"Hey, bro," Mike says. "What's up?"

Leo hadn't been intending to enter, but Mike's greeting is clearly an invitation, and a moment later he is sitting on the bed, beside his younger brother, watching him play with the wooden cat Leo had carved in Japan.

"How are you?" Leo asks. It isn't any kind of answer to Mike's question, but then, he doesn't think Mike was really looking for an answer.

Mike looks at him quizzically. "How should I be?"

Leo makes a vague gesture. "Well, about the ghosts, and about… um..."

"It's good," Mike says. "I'm fine."

Leo falls silent, studying his knees.

"What's on your mind, bro?" Mike asks.

"I… I don't know what to do now," Leo admits. "You guys have told me what you _don't_ want me to do, but when I ask what you _do_ want me to do, no one will tell me."

Mike walks the cat across his palm. "Well, what do _you_ want to do?"

"Mikey –" Leo's fingers clench, as he struggles to explain the source of his frustration. "I don't want anything for myself. That isn't – I –"

Mike looks at him. "There's seriously nothing you want?"

Leo shakes his head. "No."

"Geez." Mike gazes across the room. "All those times we asked you what you really wanted to do, and you said you only wanted to take care of us… we thought you were just trying to score points with Master Splinter or something."

"No," Leo says. "You guys are everything to me. I can't imagine wanting anything else."

"Man." Mike turns the cat over in his hands. "Kinda makes _me_ feel like a selfish jerk."

"Never." Leo lifts his hand to rub Mike's shoulder. "I like seeing you happy." With his other hand, he gestures to the little carving. "Do you like it? I'm sorry I couldn't bring you anything better…"

"No," Mike says, turning the cat upright and looking closely at the details of its face. "It's awesome." He turns to flash a smile at his brother. "Hey, you know what you should do?"

Leo frowns. "What?"

"You should make more of these things," Mike says. He holds out the wooden toy. "You could sell them. It would be good money."

Leo takes the cat, and looks at it uncertainly. "How could I sell them?"

"Oh, good question." Mike pretends to think very hard. "Hey, don't we know someone who owns a store for neat stuff?"

Leo smiles slowly. "You know," he says, "I think we do."

* * *

They've been working on the new Lair for five weeks now, slowly turning it from a shelter into a home, and Splinter finally thinks that it is worthy of the name.

And he thinks that he was wrong about another thing.

His three younger sons _could_ have built a new home, without their eldest brother, but it would not have been good for them. It would have been difficult, and painful, and the end result, Splinter feels sure, would not have been anywhere near what they have achieved as a whole family, as an unbroken unit.

Learning to live together again has been hard, too, but his sons have been managing admirably. They are reaching out tentatively, finding their places, stepping into them a little more each day.

And, as they step forward, as they move around one another, Splinter steps back. His sons are eighteen now, nearly adults, and it is time for him too to learn to let go.

Splinter smiles to himself.

Learning does not stop, and life goes on.

* * *

Mike steals a sheet of paper from the spiral notebook, folds it into an origami house, and props it on the shelf by his bed, along with the little wooden cat.

So he'll always remember that home is not a physical place.

It's family.

And it doesn't matter whether his walls are made of wood, or stone, or paper.

What matters is that as long as he keeps his family in his heart, they are always as close as the next room.

And there is always a door.


End file.
